Estate Planning Is Really About the People You Love

This is what happens when you start your own law firm and your family is willing to humor you: matching sweatshirts. The photo includes my dad, my brother, my daughter, two of my dogs, and a whole lot of Mastroianni Legacy Law representation. I love the picture because these are some of my favorite people (and favorite dogs), but there’s another reason it means something to me. This is my “why.”

Estate planning involves Wills, trusts, powers of attorney, beneficiary designations, probate, and plenty of legal documents. But estate planning is really about people. It’s about the people we love and worry about, the people we want to make things easier for, and the people who may someday have to figure things out when we’re no longer there to help. That’s true when I’m working with clients, and it’s true in my own family.

Estate Planning Gets More Personal When It’s Your Own Family

I spent this summer working from my dad’s home in the Adirondacks. Before I headed home, I wanted to sit down with him and review his estate plan, including his accounts and beneficiary designations, to make sure everything still worked the way he intended.

I don’t enjoy talking to my own dad about what will happen when he dies. I can talk about death, incapacity, probate, and estate planning with clients and podcast listeners all day long. It feels different when the person sitting across from you is your own parent. Being an estate planning attorney doesn’t make that conversation any less personal.

But I practice what I preach, so we sat down together and went through everything. And we found something: one account still listed my mom as the beneficiary. My mom died almost 14 years ago. My dad has an estate plan. He has a trust. His daughter is an estate planning attorney who hosts an entire podcast about this stuff. And still, there was a beneficiary designation that hadn’t kept up with his life. So we fixed it.

Your Estate Plan Has to Keep Up With Your Life

That experience was a good reminder of something I tell people all the time: estate planning isn’t just about creating documents. You can have a beautifully drafted Will or revocable trust, but those documents don’t control everything you own. Some assets pass according to beneficiary designations. Others may pass to a surviving joint owner. Still others may be owned by or pass to a trust.

And none of those arrangements necessarily updates itself just because your life changes. People die, get married, and get divorced. Children grow up and relationships change. You open new accounts and close old ones. You change banks, buy houses, sell houses, and move to a different state. Meanwhile, a beneficiary designation you completed years ago can sit on an account without attracting any attention at all.

That’s why reviewing an estate plan should involve more than pulling your Will out of a drawer every few years and checking whether the names still look right. It also means looking at what you actually own and asking a simple question about each asset: What happens to this asset when I die?

Take your home, checking and savings accounts, brokerage accounts, retirement accounts, and life insurance. Is the asset owned by your trust? Does it have a beneficiary, payable-on-death, or transfer-on-death designation? Do you own it jointly with someone else? And, most importantly, does the way that asset will pass today still match what you actually want to happen? The goal is to have an estate plan in which your estate planning documents, asset ownership, and beneficiary designations work together.

Then Get Back to Living

There will never be a day when talking to my dad about his death is an enjoyable father-daughter activity. But we don’t have to enjoy these conversations to recognize that they’re worth having. So we have the conversations, check the accounts and fix the things that need fixing.

And then we put on matching Mastroianni Legacy Law sweatshirts, wrangle the dogs into a family photo, and get back to enjoying the time we have together. 

Does Your Estate Plan Still Match Your Life?

If you’re in Tennessee, I can help you create an estate plan that looks beyond the documents to how all the pieces are supposed to work together. We’ll talk about what you own, how your assets pass, the people you want to protect, and what you actually want your estate plan to accomplish. Click here to learn about Tennessee estate planning.