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Strategies & Market Trends : Estate Planning -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Cisco who wrote (64)	2/11/2005 12:29:10 PM
From: Cisco	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 79

Here is an update on what I ended up doing on my Estate Planning. I got my witnesses, a notary, and myself together yesterday afternoon for a signing party.<g> I settled on the following documents as backbone of my planning: 1. Living Will Directive and Health Care Surrogate Designation 2. Advanced Directive and Durable Power of Attorney for Health Care 3. Durable Power of Attorney for Financial Management 4. Declaration of Trust 5. Certification of Trust 6. Will 7. Final Arrangements 8. Information for Caregivers and Survivors 9. Transfer on Death authorizations The next task which is well under way and I hope to have finish next week is funding the Trust. I dropped off Deeds to be recorded this morning. I will be sending a copy of the recorded deed along with supporting documents required by my mortgage company next week to show my compliance with Garn-St. Germain Depository Institutions Act. I will be mailing change of beneficiary forms today to various insurance, banks, and other institutions. It will end up taking less than a week for me to go from signing the documents to having the trust completely funded and I learned a lot along the way. I even discovered a major mistake in a deed I had prepared professionally a few years ago by a leading attorney firm in Cincinnati specializing in real estate transactions. Maybe, I should have drawn up that deed too.<g> As with most important decisions I make, I let the documents sit on my computer for two or three weeks and read over them several times to make sure they did what I intended and met the letter of the law. I kept most of my financial tools such as bank accounts and brokerage accounts outside of the trust but have filled out TODs on each to my trust. The only other thing I chose to keep out of my trust was my automobile. This may be the only thing that will go through my Will. I did leave a pour over clause in my will since I will have two subtrusts in my living trust for my children. I will redo my will when both of my children are over 25, remove this clause, and just make it a basic back up will. This will allow the Trust to be wrapped up in short order, but with two subtrusts, time is not really a factor at this point. Finally, since I need to leave my trust as the beneficiary for my life insurance to assure liquidity early on for my successor trustees, I purchased an umbrella liability insurance policy on myself to protect those proceeds from potential claims against my estate. I will readdress this issue again in 5 or 6 years when the liquidity won’t be an issue. I hope that my thinking aloud on this project will encourage others to get their house in order as well, if they haven already. Even if one chooses to use an attorney for their estate planning, I encourage them to think through the process themselves. One’s attorney can only be as good as the information he or she is given.