November 12, 2018
Estate Plan Progress Report | Berry’s Bites
Is it time to check on your estate plan? Just like progress reports in school, it’s import to do a legal and financial progress report check up. For example, does your estate plan protect you from long-term care costs?
Chris Berry with Berry’s Bites. Today we’re going to talk about progress reports. My kids actually just received their progress reports today at school, or not today but this last week, and both are doing great. Both need to work on writing, which is something that is not one of my strong points either, so it made sense.
But I was thinking about this, is that we need financial and legal progress reports as well. For a lot of people, they haven’t put any thought into their estate plan in five, 10 years, and sometimes it’s time for a check-up, or an audit of that plan, if you will.
Estate Plan Progress Report Transcript:
Chris Berry with Berry’s Bites. Today we’re going to talk about progress reports. My kids actually just received their progress reports today at school, or not today but this last week, and both are doing great. Both need to work on writing, which is something that is not one of my strong points either, so it made sense.
But I was thinking about this, is that we need financial and legal progress reports as well. For a lot of people, they haven’t put any thought into their estate plan in five, 10 years, and sometimes it’s time for a check-up, or an audit of that plan, if you will.
That’s one of the things that we do for our clients is that once they’ve attended one of our workshops, we walk them through what we call an estate planning audit, where we look to see what current documents do they have, so do they have a trust, a will, a financial power of attorney, medical power of attorney, a personal care plan, deed, final expenses taken care of.
And then, once we identify what documents that we do or don’t have, then we go through about 10 different issues, issue spotting the documents to see if, A, it’s something that’s important, should be part of the plan, and then, B, if it’s included in the plan or not, because not all issues, not all goals are important to everyone. Every family works a little bit differently, and they have things that they may or may not be concerned about.
Some of those things that we look at through that estate planning audit is whether the estate plan takes care of long-term care costs. For example, have we put together a plan to pay for the devastating costs of long-term care in a nursing home, which can run $8,000 to $12,000 a month? This is probably one of the biggest issues that I see is that a lot of the estate plans I review, a lot of the trusts don’t take into account an answer for the long-term care dilemma, and so that’s one of the things that we figure out as part of our estate planning audit.
Then we look at how do we leave things to the beneficiaries. Is it a pillowcase of money approach, or are we building in a lifetime of asset protection for the kids? Does the plan take into account what happens if we need long-term care, how best to utilize money, or where we’re going to receive the care? For example, that would be in the personal care plan. Have we taken care of any final expenses to make sure that we’re not leaving a mess for the kids to clean up, for the kids to pay for those final expenses?
These are all things that we figure out in that estate planning audit as part of our vision conversations. And it’s important, just like how my children have progress reports going through school, it’s important as you’re going through life to get a progress report, get a update and make sure that plan that you have in place meets your goals.
Hopefully this was helpful. This has been Chris Berry with Berry’s Bites. It might be time for that progress report. Thanks.