4 Things Your Estate Plan Needs to Cover

At getyourshittogether.org, you can read about one woman's mission to teach people how to take the few simple steps to get their act together.

One man from East Palo Alto, found his grandmother and mother both passing away in the same year.  Luckily, his grandmother had prepared for her departure.  This made the family's life extremely easy and funeral arrangements were smooth.  The family had the time it needed to heal emotionally.

However, when his mother died, everything became a sudden mess.  He found his family arguing over the house she owned, which ultimately was lost to the foreclosure process, meaning his family lost all the equity.

Her funeral arrangements were a mess leaving the family bitter about having to deal with another stress in their day to day life, when they should have been grieving over the loss of a great woman.

Do you want this to happen to your family?

Here are some items you may want to consider taking care of:

1. Life insurance to replace the loss of income
2. A will to designate legal and physical custody of children
3. A living trust to determine ownership of assets
4. A living will to show decisions in the case of serious health problems

The first 3 items cover the case of a premature death in the family.

This post was reposted from http://finlit.biz/estate-planning/4-things-your-estate-plan-needs-to-cover/, originally written on February 6th, 2013.

Why Do You Need a Living Trust?

According to hbllp.com, living trusts help to manage the assets of an individual during their lifetime and may be more difficult to challenge than a normal will. In my opinion, one would want to think about a trust when considering the health issues associated with aging. At some point in time, as the mind grows older, we should place our trust into other individuals to make decisions for us.

For most people, this can be extremely difficult to do, since many of us believe we should be independent and not rely on other people.  In addition, to setting up a living trust to manage assets, one should also consider a plan to take care of other aspects of life besides the financial aspect.  This is all an important part of planning out our future.

Do you have any related comments on particular situations where a living trust was helpful for your family?  Do you think your family should or should not have a living trust in place?

A related article is Why Do You Need a Will?

This post was reposted from http://finlit.biz/estate-planning/why-do-you-need-a-living-trust/, originally written on January 2013.

3 Questions to Determine If You Need a Will

What is the biggest reason you may need a will? My current belief is that if you do not have a will, your children may get caught up in the system while the state determines who should take care of your children. What happens if that takes 2 to 3 years to clear up? I have not seen this first hand but wonder if any of the readers have seen this. What horror stories have you heard about? People are busy but out of all the things we need to take care of, what is more important than our family?

From financialplan.about.com, here are 3 questions you should ask to determine if you need a will:


1. Do you care who gets your property if you die?
2. Do you care who gets your money if you die?
3. Do you care who is appointed guardian of your minor children if you die?

Related articles:

• money.cnn.com
• www.forbes.com
• www.nolo.com
• blogbydonna.com

This post was reposted from http://finlit.biz/estate-planning/3-questions-to-determine-if-you-need-a-will/, originally written on January 26th, 2013.