King & Wood, P.A.

Estate Planning for Millennials and Gen Zers

“Millennials and Gen Zers are taking their estate planning seriously. These tips can help make the process seem less daunting.”

Estate planning is increasingly on the mind of younger adults, far from the stereotype of being only of interest to older, affluent couples nearing retirement or dealing with health concerns. These younger generations have unique attributes, including pragmatic financial views and humanitarian concerns, according to a recent article, “Six Estate Planning Tips for Younger Generations,” from Kiplinger. Here are tips to make this process easier for any generation.

Start with a basic will, which guides how assets and possessions are distributed after one’s passing. Prepared by an experienced estate planning attorney, the will should minimize potential disputes, include a clear delineation of assets and beneficiaries and name an executor to manage the estate and guardianship for any surviving dependents.

Appoint a power of attorney and draft medical directives. Power of Attorney and Medical Directives are basic documents that state your preferences during incapacity. A POA grants a named individual the legal authority to act on your behalf for legal and financial matters, if you cannot do so. Medical directives establish your wishes regarding medical treatment and end-of-life care. While taking care of these matters, you may also want to consider becoming an organ donor.

Determine who you want to be your children’s guardian. Naming a guardian of your minor children isn’t pleasant. However, it ensures that you and your partner make this decision, not the court.

Consider a living trust. Living trusts offer a strategic means of managing assets and helping to ensure that your surviving loved ones maintain control of your assets after you have passed. The trust, established with the help of an estate planning attorney, grants ownership of certain assets or properties into the trust, which becomes their owner. A trustee is named to manage and distribute these assets in accordance with your wishes. In some instances, it makes sense to hire a professional trustee, especially if the trust will need to be managed for decades.

By taking assets out of your estate and placing them into a trust, these assets won’t go through the probate process. Probate involves your executor filing your will with a court after you die. The court reviews the will to validate it and grants the named executor the power to execute your final instructions. Probate can be lengthy, expensive and emotionally charged for the family. Your will is entered into the public record, so anyone who wants to can see your will and know your final wishes.

Don’t forget your digital assets. Younger generations are more aware of the value and footprint of their digital assets. They often name a specific digital executor in their estate plans to ensure that their many accounts and digital assets are managed after their passing.

Seek professional advice and update documents. Despite a plethora of online sites and apps, estate planning documents require the skillful handling of an experienced estate planning attorney. Estate laws are state-specific, so wills and trust documents must be created with local laws in mind. Your estate plan documents, from wills to insurance policies, should be reviewed every three to five years. Every time there’s a significant change in your life, like getting married, buying a home, having a child, or getting divorced, this should also be done.

Reference: Kiplinger (Dec. 3, 2023) “Six Estate Planning Tips for Younger Generations”

Does Divorce Have an Impact on Estate Planning?

“When you're in the midst of a divorce, you're probably not thinking about estate planning or your will. However, if you're divorcing, you should think about the impact a divorce can have on an estate plan.”

Even the most amicable divorce requires a review and update of your estate plan, as explained in a recent article from yahoo! finance, “I’m Divorcing. Will That Impact My Estate Planning?” This includes your will, power of attorney and other documents. Not getting this part of divorce right can have long-term repercussions, even after your death.

Last will and testament. If you don’t have a will, you should get this started. Why? If anything unexpected occurs, like dying while your divorce is in process, the people you want to receive your worldly goods will actually receive them, and the people you don’t want to receive your property won’t. If you do have a will and an estate plan and if your will leaves all of your property to your soon-to-be ex-spouse, then you may want to change it. Just a suggestion.

State laws handle assets in a will differently. Therefore, talk with your estate planning attorney and be sure your will is updated to reflect your new status, even before your divorce is finalized.

Trusts. The first change is to remove your someday-to-be ex-spouse as a trustee, if this is how you set up the trust. If you don’t have a trust and have children or others you would want to inherit assets, now might be the time to create a trust.

A Domestic Asset Protection Trust (DAPT) could be used to transfer assets to a trustee on behalf of minor children. The assets would not be considered marital property, so your spouse would not be entitled to them. However, a DAPT is an irrevocable trust, so once it’s created and funded, you would not be able to access these assets.

Review insurance policies. You’ll want to remove your spouse from insurance policies, especially life insurance. If you have young children with your spouse and you are sharing custody, you may want to keep your ex as a beneficiary, especially if that was ordered by the court. If you received your health insurance through your spouse’s plan, you’ll need to look into getting your own coverage after the divorce.

Power of Attorney. If your spouse is listed as your financial power of attorney and your healthcare power of attorney, there are steps you’ll need to take to make this change. First, you have to notify the person in writing to tell them a change is being made. This is especially urgent if you are reducing or eliminating their authority over your financial and legal affairs. You may only change or revoke a power of attorney in writing. Most states have specific language required to do this, and a local estate planning attorney can help do this properly.

You also have to notify all interested parties. This includes anyone who might regularly work with your power of attorney, or who should know this change is being made.

Divide Retirement Accounts. How these assets are divided depends on what kind of accounts they are and when the earnings were received. The court must issue a Qualified Domestic Relations Order (QDRO) before defined contribution plans can be split. The judge must sign this document, which allows plan administrators to enforce it. This applies to 401(k) plans, 403(b) plans and any plans governed under ERISA (Employment Retirement Income Security Act of 1974).

Divorce is stressful enough, and it may feel overwhelming to add estate planning into the mix. However, doing so will prevent many future problems and unwanted surprises.

Reference: yahoo! finance (Feb. 3, 2023) “I’m Divorcing. Will That Impact My Estate Planning?”

Why Is it Important to Have an Estate Plan?

“The problem is that while you expect to die of old age, this is not always guaranteed–which may cause uncertainties in the way your assets are distributed.”

By the time you reach your thirties, it’s likely you’ve accumulated some assets—maybe a home, a car, a savings account and some cryptocurrency. However, if you are like most millennials, even though you know you should have a will, you probably don’t. A recent article, “5 Reasons Estate Planning Is So Important” from The Baltic Times, reports a staggering 68% of millennials don’t have will or an estate plan. If you own anything, you need an estate plan. Here’s why.

A kindness to your family. A family can have great relationships. However, when someone dies and everyone thinks they have a right to the estate, fights can begin. Even if you’ve shared holidays throughout your lives, a court battle will put an end to your traditions. If there are divorced members of the family, it can become even more complicated.

An estate plan can prevent these disputes before they begin. It gives you time to discuss your plans with beneficiaries. If you have difficult family members, you may want to have a conversation in your estate planning attorney’s office. The presence of an estate planning attorney often puts family members on notice: you’re serious about this and are not going to be manipulated.

Protection for beneficiaries. Not everyone wants their immediate family to be their beneficiaries. Let’s say someone is separated but not divorced. They want to be sure their children or other family members inherit. However, without a will, the spouse will still be first in line from a next-of-kin standpoint. An estate plan directs who you want to get your property.

There are other documents in estate plans, including trusts, to further protect assets. A trust can allow you to leave property for minor children in a trust and determine exactly when you want them to receive the assets. That may be over their lifetimes, or when they reach certain milestones.

Minimize taxes for the estate and beneficiaries. Certain states have estate taxes and inheritance taxes. Even if the value of your estate doesn’t reach current federal estate tax exemption levels ($12.06 million for individuals in 2022), there may be other estate taxes you could avoid or minimize through estate planning.

Intestacy statute law. If you don’t have a will, the state has one for you, but you may not like it. Each state has what’s called “intestacy” statutes which direct how estates should be distributed when people don’t have wills. If you didn’t want your immediate family to inherit your property, it won’t matter if you don’t have a will. The partner or close friend who may be your family of choice won’t have any ability to challenge the law.

Peace of mind for you and your loved ones. Creating an estate plan establishes a legally enforceable blueprint of what you want to happen to your assets. If you have minor children, an estate plan is used to name the guardian you want to raise your children. Your estate plan also names who you want to make decisions for you if you become incapacitated through a Power of Attorney, and who may make healthcare decisions for you—Health Care Power of Attorney.

Once you have your estate plan done, you’ll find a worry you didn’t even know you had has lifted. You’ve done the right thing to protect yourself and your loved ones. It’s a good feeling to know that you’ve taken care of those you love.

Reference: The Baltic Times (Sep. 29, 2022) “5 Reasons Estate Planning Is So Important”

Why Is Beneficiary Designation Important?

“When you set up your estate plan it is important to coordinate the legal planning documents that you or you and your attorney create with the document provided by your retirement account custodian and/or your life insurance carrier called a ‘Designation of Beneficiary.’”

The beneficiary designation will always supersede language of your will. Neglecting to know which assets have beneficiary designations and failing to update the designations can undo even the best estate plan.

The beneficiary designation for your life insurance or retirement account custodian provides an opportunity to tell the company who is to receive life insurance proceeds or retirement savings upon your death, explains a recent article titled “This Important Estate Planning Step is Often Missed” from Coeur d’Alene/Post Falls Press. If these are not coordinated with a last will and testament, the results are problematic at best, and worse, financially, and emotionally devastating.

This epic fail comes in many different forms, but the most common is when a life insurance policy has never been updated and an ex-spouse receives the policy proceeds. The rules differ between retirement accounts and life insurance and can be impacted by various state and federal laws (and the divorce decree, if the life insurance policy was included). However, for the most part, the ex will receive the proceeds and litigation will not succeed.

Another common beneficiary designation mistake is when a person has created a living trust or revocable trust to prevent assets from going through probate when they die. Probate can take many months to complete and there are several strategies used to take assets out of the probate estate.

When the living trust is established and assets are transferred into the trust, those assets do not pass through probate.

However, if a person (or married couple) established a living trust and fails to list both primary and secondary beneficiaries for life insurance and/or retirement accounts, it is entirely possible that the assets will go through probate.

Take the time to make an inventory of all assets and accounts. Determine which ones have a beneficiary designation and find out who is named as the beneficiary. If your retirement accounts and life insurance policies were established decades ago, this is especially important.

Failing to coordinate beneficiary designations with your estate plan could undermine your wishes. Review these items with your estate planning attorney to avoid these and many other potential pitfalls.

Reference: Coeur d’Alene/Post Falls Press (May 23, 2022) “This Important Estate Planning Step is Often Missed”

Why Is Having a Will Important?

“A striking proportion of Americans don’t have one. Nontraditional families are left uniquely vulnerable.”

Most studies reveal fewer than half of American adults have an estate plan, including a last will and testament, to detail how they want property to be divided and distributed. Some portion of this group choses “alternative” types of estate planning, which may or may not succeed, others may draft a will late in life and many just never get around to it at all, says the recent article “The Problem With Wills” from The Atlantic. The stakes are higher than most people imagine.

Without planning for your demise, control of your assets, probably a lifetime of work, is given over to a decades-old bureaucratic system where your loved ones won’t have any say in what happens. Every state has laws to automatically designate heirs, known as “intestate-succession laws.” They vary depending on the jurisdiction. However, the hierarchy for distribution is traditional and inflexible.

If there is a spouse, the spouse receives most of the estate.

Not married? The children are the next inheritors.

No children? Biological parents or siblings are next in line.

Non-married, nonbiological family members will not receive any inheritance if there is no will. These laws were created decades ago and have not been updated to reflect the complexity of today’s American families. Nontraditional families, in particular, can be disinherited if there is no will and no estate plan. It sounds harsh—and it is.

Many people of modest means have property to pass along to heirs, from houses to personal property. A study from 2009 found people with six-figure incomes had more than double the rate of wills than those who earned less than $25,000.

While there are many reasons for this, much is the simple fact of people not wanting to think about their own deaths. Wealthy people may have more to protect. However, it’s also important for people of modest means to protect their families and their assets with an estate plan.

Nontraditional families are at greater risk for disinheritance. Despite the number of co-habitating people nearly tripling in the last 20 years, only one state (New Hampshire) allows non-married people to receive inheritance rights on the death of their partner.

Challenges also exist if a child is raised by a family but never formally adopted. The court’s position is the child is not next-of-kin. For blended families, the situations become even more tangled. A woman with a biological son divorces the son’s father and remarries. If she dies without a will, everything will pass to her new spouse, and the biological child, if receiving anything, will receive a small share. If her second spouse remarries and dies without a will, the child will be disinherited again, even though there may be remaining assets originally belonging to the mother.

The intestacy laws reveal how dated the system is. However, until they are changed to reflect the many different types of families, the best way forward is to work with an experienced estate planning attorney to create an estate plan to protect all members of the family, traditional and otherwise.

Reference: The Atlantic (May 17, 2022) “The Problem With Wills”

Should You Update Your Estate Plan?

“Frequent triggers also include changes in the health of executors and guardians; changes in laws, which may impact tax and legal strategies; and changes in state residence, which can also impact planning.”

Some reasons to update your will are more obvious than others, like marriage, divorce, remarriage, births and deaths. However, those aren’t the only reasons your estate plan needs to be reviewed, explains a recent article appropriately titled “When it comes to a will or estate plan, don’t just set it and forget it” from CNBC.

Think of your estate plan like your home. They both need regular updates and maintenance. If your house starts to get rundown or the roof springs a leak, you know you need to get it fixed. Your estate plan is not as visible. However, it is still in need of ongoing maintenance.

Health events should be a trigger, yours or people named in your will. If the person you named as your executor becomes ill or dies, you’ll need to name a new person to replace them. The same goes for a guardian named to care for any minor children, especially if you named a grandparent for this role.

If you move, your estate plan must ‘move’ with you. Each state has different laws regarding how estates are administered. In one state, an executor living out of state may be okay. However, in another, it may make the executor ineligible to serve. Inheritance tax laws also vary.

Any time there is a large change to your personal wealth, whether it’s good or bad, your estate planning attorney should review your will.

The same goes for a change in parental status. The birth of additional children seems like it might not require a review. However, it does. More than a few celebrities failed to update their estate plans and accidentally disinherited children. The same person who may be willing to be a guardian for one child, may find taking on two or three children to be too much of a challenge. If you want to change the guardianship, your estate plan needs to be updated.

A change in your relationship with fiduciaries also merits an update. Someone you named ten years ago to be your executor may no longer be a part of your life, or they may have died. Family members age, retire and move and siblings have changes in their own lives. Reviewing the executor regularly is important.

If a family member becomes disabled, you may need special needs planning.

A commonly overlooked trigger concerns mergers and acquisitions of financial institutions. If your bank is the executor of your estate and the bank is bought or sold, you likely have a new executor. Do you know who the person is, and do you trust their judgment?

Beneficiaries need to be checked every few years to be sure they are still correct. If your life includes a divorce and remarriage, you could be like one man whose life insurance proceeds and property went to his new spouse. His daughter was disinherited because he failed to update his will.

It doesn’t take long to review an estate plan or beneficiaries. However, the impact of not doing so could be long-lasting and cast a negative light on your legacy.

Reference: CNBC (March 1, 2022) “When it comes to a will or estate plan, don’t just set it and forget it”

Can I Protect My Inheritance from Divorce?

“Your dad bequeathed you a generous sum of money on his passing. Those gifted and inherited assets, in many instances, will be considered ‘separate property,’ not marital property. That might mean that they might not be subject to division, if you divorce. However, perhaps you want to backstop that hoped for result to make the protection more likely to stick if your marriage doesn’t work out.”

Even if divorce is the last thing on your mind, when an inheritance is received, its wise to treat it differently from your joint assets, advises a recent article “Revocable Inheritance Trust: Inexpensive Divorce Protection” from Forbes. After all, most people don’t expect to be divorced. However, the numbers have to be considered—many do divorce, even those who least expect it.

Maintaining separate property is the most important step to take. If you deposit a spouse’s paycheck into the account with your inheritance, even if it was by accident, you’ve now commingled the funds.

You might get lucky and have a forensic accountant who can dissect that amount and make the argument it was a mistake, as long as it only happened once, but the Court might not agree.

Long before the Court gets to consider this point, if your ex-spouse’s attorney is aggressively pursuing this one act of commingling as enough to make the property jointly owned, you could lose half of your inheritance in a divorce.

You might also try to mount a defense of the particular account or asset being separate property, by identifying the means of transfer. Was there a deed for real estate gifted to you from a parent or a wire transfer for securities? This information will need to be carefully identified and safeguarded as soon as the inheritance comes to you, in case of any future upheavals.

To spare yourself any of this grief, there are steps to be taken now to avoid commingling. Document the source of wealth involved as a gift or inheritance, maintain the property in a wholly separate account and consider keeping it in a different financial institution than any other accounts to avoid commingling.

Another way to safeguard gifts and inherited property against a 50% divorce rate is to use a revocable trust. Creating a revocable trust to own this separate property allows you to make changes to it any time but maintains its separate nature, by serving as a wholly separate accounting entity. The trust will own the property, while you as grantor (creator of the trust) and trustee (responsible for managing the trust) maintain control.

For a turbo-charged version of this concept, you could go with a self-settled domestic asset protection trust. This is a more complex trust and may not be necessary. Your estate planning attorney will be able to explain the difference between this trust and a revocable trust.

One clear warning: if you have already created a revocable trust to protect your estate and it is not funded, you may feel like it would be most convenient to use this already-existing trust for your inheritance. That would not be wise. You should have a completely different trust created for the inherited property, and this would also be a wise time to remember to fund the existing trust.

Using a revocable trust this way will also require customized language in your Last Will, as you’ll want standard language in the Last Will to reflect the trust being separate from your other marital property.

Reference: Forbes (April 13, 2022) “Revocable Inheritance Trust: Inexpensive Divorce Protection”

What a Will Won’t Accomplish

“That last will and testament you have tucked away? It may not be the last word on what happens to your stuff after you are gone. Instead, that legal document’s directives for doling out your wealth may be overruled by other paperwork and relevant laws.”

Everyone needs a will. A last will and testament is how an executor is named to manage your estate, how a guardian is named to care for any minor children and how you give directions for distribution of property. However, not all property passes via your will. You’ll want to know what a will can and cannot do, as well as how assets are distributed outside of a will. This was the topic of “The Legal Limits of Your Will” from AARP Magazine.

Retirement and Pension Accounts

The beneficiaries named on retirement accounts, including 401(k)s, pensions, and IRAs, receive these assets directly. Some states have laws about requiring spouses to receive some or all assets. However, if you don’t keep these beneficiary names updated, the wrong person may receive the asset, like it or not. Don’t expect anyone to willingly give up a surprise windfall. If a primary beneficiary has died and no contingency beneficiary was named, the recipient may also be determined by default terms, which may not be what you have in mind.

Life Insurance Policies.

The beneficiary designations on an insurance policy determine who will receive proceeds upon your death. Laws vary by state, so check with an estate planning attorney to learn what would happen if you died without updating life insurance policies. A simpler strategy is to create a list of all of your financial accounts, determine how they are distributed and update names as necessary.

Note there are exceptions to all rules. If your divorce agreement includes a provision naming your ex as the sole beneficiary, you may not have an option to make a change.

Financial Accounts

Adding another person to your bank account through various means—Payable on Death (POD), Transfer on Death (TOD), or Joint Tenancy with Right of Survivorship (JTWROS)—may generally override a will, but may not be acceptable for all accounts, or to all financial institutions. There are unanticipated consequences of transferring assets this way, including the simplest: once transferred, assets are immediately vulnerable to creditors, divorce proceedings, etc.

Trusts

Trusts are used in estate planning to remove assets from a personal estate and place them in safekeeping for beneficiaries. Once the assets are properly transferred into the trust, their distribution and use are defined by the trust document. The flexibility and variety of trusts makes this a key estate planning tool, regardless of the value of the assets in the estate.

Reference: AARP Magazine (Sep. 29, 2021) “The Legal Limits of Your Will”

Estate Planning Mistakes to Avoid

“According to a Caring.com survey, only 4 in 10 American adults have a will or a living trust. And what may be even more surprising is that younger adults are outpacing their middle-aged and older counterparts when it comes to estate planning.”

Estate planning is crucial to ensure that wealth accumulated over a lifetime is distributed according to your wishes and will take care of your family when you are no longer able to do so. Many well-intentioned people make common mistakes, which could be avoided with the guidance of an estate planning attorney, says the article “Avoiding Big Estate Planning Mistakes” from Physician’s Weekly.

Do you have a will? Many families must endure the red tape and expenses of “intestate” probate because a parent never got around to having a will prepared. The process is relatively straightforward: identify an estate planning attorney and make an appointment. Once the will is completed, make sure several trusted people, likely family members, know where it is and can access it.

Are you properly insured? If the last time you looked at your life insurance coverage was more than ten years ago, it’s probably not kept pace with your life. Although every person’s situation is different, high- income earners, like physicians or other professionals, need to understand that life insurance “replaces” income. This means enough to pay for college, pay off a mortgage and provide for your surviving spouse and children’s lifestyles.

When was the last time you spoke with your estate planning attorney, CPA, or financial advisor? Tax laws are constantly changing, and if your estate plan is not keeping up with those changes, you may be missing out on planning opportunities. Your family also may end up with a big tax bill, if your estate plan hasn’t been revised in the last three or four years. Your team of professionals is only as good as you let them be, so stay in touch with them.

When was the last time you reviewed your estate plan with your attorney? If you thought an estate plan was a set-it-and-forget-it plan, think again. Tax laws aren’t the only thing that changes. If you’ve divorced and remarried, you definitely need a new estate plan—and possibly a post-nuptial agreement. Have your children grown up, married and perhaps had children of their own? Do you have a new and troublesome son-in-law and want to protect your daughter’s inheritance? All of the changes in your life need to be reflected in your estate plan.

Having “the talk” with your family. No one wants to think about their own mortality or their parent’s mortality. However, if you don’t discuss your estate plan and your wishes with your family, they will not know what you want to happen. It doesn’t need to be a summit meeting, but a series of conversations to allow your loved ones to become comfortable with the discussion and make it more likely your wishes will be fulfilled. This includes your estate plan and your wishes for burial or cremation and what kind of memorial service you want.

Reference: Physician’s Weekly (Oct. 8, 2021) “Avoiding Big Estate Planning Mistakes”

Is My Will Void If I Get Divorced?

“Major changes in your life—such as marriage, having a baby, moving out of state, or divorce—should prompt a revisit to your current will. It is important to revise your will at these times, in order to ensure your estate planning is up to date.”

If you neglect to update your estate plan after a divorce, everything you gave to your ex in your original will could very well add up to a nice post-divorce inheritance. Even in the most amicable divorces, it’s probably not what you had intended. Yet, as reported in the article “Rewriting Your Will After Divorce” from Investopedia, people do this.

Depending on where you live, there might be a law that automatically revokes gifts to a former spouse listed in a will. In Florida, there is a statute addressing this. In Texas, a law revokes gifts to the former spouse and their relatives. However, unless you know the laws of your state as well as an estate planning attorney, it’s best to let the estate planning attorney protect your estate.

What happens if you die before you are legally divorced?

If your will leaves everything to your surviving spouse and you are currently in the process of separating and divorcing, it’s time for a new will, as soon as possible.

Don’t forget assets passing outside of the will. Assets with beneficiary designations, like life insurance, investment accounts and some retirement plans, go directly to the beneficiary listed on the account. If the beneficiary is your ex, you should also make those changes as soon as possible.

Your estate plan must also update any property gained or lost during the divorce. If any assets are specifically identified in your will, be sure to update them.

The executor (the person named in your will to oversee the distribution of assets) probably has to be changed as well. If you had previously named your ex-spouse, it’s time to name a new executor.

Your will is also used to name a guardian for minor children. If you have children with your ex, you will want to appoint a guardian in case both you and your ex are not alive to raise them. If you die unexpectedly, your spouse will raise them, but you should still name a guardian. If a surviving parent has a serious problem, like addiction, child abuse or incarceration, naming a guardian in your will and documenting the reasons you believe your ex is an unfit parent may be a deciding factor in how a judge awards custody.

A will can be updated by writing a codicil, which is an amendment to a previous or a prior will. However, since there may be many changes to a will in a divorce, it is better to tear up the old one—literally—and start over. A prior will is revoked by physically tearing up and destroying the original and including language in the new will that it will revokes all prior wills. Your attorney will know how to do this properly.

Your ex may have the legal right to challenge your will. This is why an estate planning attorney is so necessary to create a new will. There are provisions in some states that may give your ex more rights than in other states. In a divorce situation, the use of an experienced estate planning attorney can make the difference in your ex receiving a windfall and your new spouse or children receiving their rightful inheritance.

Reference: Investopedia (September 14, 2021) “Rewriting Your Will After Divorce”