Depending on your estate’s size and the complexity of your assets and familial situation, working with an estate planning attorney can be a critical part of ensuring the best outcome after your passing. Basically, estate planning ensures that everything goes where it needs to go after you die, including your assets and property, as well as certain powers others can enact on your behalf. Most of the time, people will wait until they’re a certain age to start planning for their estate. However, the blunt reality is that the end of one’s life can come without warning at any point in time. Having a well-planned will in any phase of your life is essential to ensuring your rights and legacy are carried out as you intend them to.
What Is Estate Planning?
Estate planning is creating an official plan in advance for how you want your property, belongings, and finances settled at the end of your life. More than these practical matters, it can also include personal or medical decisions to help ease the process for your next of kin. An estate planning attorney is a licensed and practicing lawyer who can assist and inform you throughout the process of organizing the disbursement, transfer, and taxation of your estate.
What Does an Estate Planning Attorney Work With?
Wills and Trusts
Your will is a certified legal document that draws out how you want your practical and personal matters handled and distributed after you die. Your trust is a financial arrangement you can organize with a trustor or a grantor to act on your behalf by granting a designated trustee the right to use your financial assets for a specific purpose, person, or entity.
Beneficiary Designations
When you work with your own estate planning attorney to designate your beneficiaries, you can allow them to receive an easy transfer of your assets, no matter the terms of your will. While you typically name your beneficiaries when you set up things like retirement accounts or an IRA, you can also designate beneficiaries on legal record for other matters involved in your estate.
Durable Power of Attorney
A durable power of attorney (DPOA) document names an individual to whom you wish to grant power to manage all of your legal and financial affairs after you pass away. By working with a good estate planning attorney, you can investigate the specific details of what this procedure entails and even customize exactly what powers you wish to transfer to the other person.
Advance Directives for Healthcare Decisions
An advance directive is also a legal document that includes instructions for how you wish your medical affairs to be handled, which only goes into effect at any point when you are unable to communicate your medical decisions. You and your estate planning attorney can review this document periodically and assess your needs at every stage of your life.
Medical Power of Attorney
A medical power of attorney is similar to a durable power of attorney but purely for medical purposes only. Who you designate as your medical power of attorney will be able to make your healthcare decisions for you should you ever get to the point where you are unable to.
Guardianship Designations
If a minor or an adult who is unable to care for themselves is under your care, it is vital to plan for a guardianship designation for them should you pass away unexpectedly. Your estate planning attorney can help you identify the appropriate individual or persons to take over the responsibilities of looking after those in your care if you and/or the other last surviving parent or guardian dies or becomes incapacitated.
Periodic Reviews and Revisions
An estate planning attorney understands that as people go through life, their needs and wishes might change. For this reason, your estate planning attorney becomes your partner throughout making the necessary revisions to your will, trust, and other estate documents, whenever and as often as you need to.
Benefits of Hiring an Estate Planning Attorney
Legal Compliance
Wills, trusts, and other important documents that relate to your assets, property, health, and finances can be at risk of being invalidated if they are filed or carried out incorrectly or against legal procedures. An estate planning attorney can guarantee your estate’s legal compliance, providing you with invaluable peace of mind that everything will work out as it should.
Navigate Complex Situations With Expert Guidance
Your estate planning attorney can be a much-needed source of professional and legal counsel for complex situations that you feel may be too difficult to handle on your own or with other family members involved. From preparing and filing your documents to ensuring that your will is executed properly after your passing, your estate planning attorney can be an important resource throughout your life and beyond.
Reduced Estate Taxes
Estate planning attorneys know the best way to distribute assets from an estate plan that can help you save on taxation costs. This can include making charitable donations, distributing assets as gifts to family and friends, or setting up specialized trusts.
Convenience for Your Loved Ones
By working with an estate planning attorney as early as you can, you’ll always have nothing to worry about should your health ever fail or if an unfortunate accident occurs. Your will ensures that your loved ones will be properly cared for with the remainder of your assets, as well as make it easier for them to handle any important arrangements after your death.
Protect Your Life’s Legacy
Planning an estate can seem daunting and emotionally taxing at first, but it is not a decision that you want to make last minute. Speak with a trusted estate planning attorney in Watertown, WI, today to come up with a plan for how best to protect you and your loved ones when that fateful day finally comes.
Book a Consultation With an Estate Planning Attorney in Watertown, WI
At Neuberger, Griggs, Sweet & Froehle, LLP, our attorneys have over a century and a half of combined legal experience and community service. Members of our phenomenal legal team all reside within the Watertown and Lake Mills, WI communities, and we will always strive to be available for you as much as we can, whenever and wherever you need us. If you’re looking for a reputable estate planning attorney in Watertown, WI, and the surrounding areas, contact us today at (920) 261-1630.
