Topic: Estate Planning

As you are going through this life transition and starting up your own independent consulting practice, it’s a good time in life to pause and to review your will and estate plan and if you don’t have one, to get one in place. Now a proper will and estate plan may cost in the neighborhood, depending on where you live and how complicated your life is, five thousand dollars more or less. But it is definitely a great investment. If you have a will estate and trust set up, then all of your assets don’t need to go through probate, saving your heirs a lot of time and hassle.

As well as designating who would take care of your children and who would take care of administering your finances if you were to pass away, it is going to save a lot of confusion later. A will and estate will even include things like the permanent custodian of your children, perhaps it’s a brother or sister who lives across the country but who would take care of those children in the day or so it’s going to take the person to arrive.

So you even would designate a temporary custodian. Part of coming up with a will and estate also would be making sure that you have a power of attorney in place, both a financial power of attorney, as well as a healthcare power of attorney. And with a financial power of attorney, those can be conditional. You might give your significant other a financial power of attorney, but it would only come into effect if you were incapacitated in some way.

So, it’s going to save your heirs and assigns and loved ones a significant amount of trouble if you’ve put a will and estate plan in place. And depending on your asset size, it may save some taxes as well. Currently, in the U.S., the tax laws allow for a fairly substantial sized estate to go tax-free to your heirs. However, there’s no guarantee that those tax laws won’t change. You want to make sure you’ve got that in place to avoid taxes to the extent possible and to make life as easy and smooth as possible if something were to happen to you