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In our introductory video to this subject of why you need to do estate planning, I went through the 5 reasons why estate planning is important. In this video, I’m going to go into more detail on that first reason, and that is, estate planning allows you to avoid unintended results.
If you don’t have an estate plan that you’ve put together, you won’t have control over your estate, and things won’t happen the way you would like. You won’t be able to direct who is going to be in charge of your estate, or who will receive your property. You may want certain things to happen, but you won’t be able to be sure those things will happen.
Let’s look at 2 examples to illustrate this point:
• First, if you are married and have children who are not also the children of your spouse (so a “blended family”), and you would want all of your assets to go to your spouse if you pass away first, then without a plan that will not happen. Without a plan, part of your assets will go to your spouse, and part will go to your children.
• Second, let’s say you’re single with 2 kids, and you would want to make specific distributions to your church or a charity, or to specific people like your grandchildren. Without a plan that won’t happen either. Unless you have an estate plan in place that specifically directs your property in those directions, then all of it will go to your children.
Basically, you need an estate plan if you want to do something that varies in any way from the generic plan that the State provides for people who don’t plan for themselves. Without the estate plan in place, then you get results you wouldn’t want.
So all in all, making sure that you have an estate plan allows you to avoid results that you don’t want to occur. You can be in control of who is in charge of your estate, you can control exactly who receives your property, and make sure that it’s as efficient as possible.
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