April 11, 2021
Life Changes | Reasons to Review and Update Your Estate and Financial Plan
Estate Planning and Financial Planning is not a one-and-done type deal because a lot of changes might happen in your life.
Atty. Chris Berry discusses reasons to check and review your Estate and Financial Plan.
Estate Attorney and Advisor Chris Berry of Castle Wealth Group answers questions on retirement and estate planning every Wednesday at 1pm. Register via this link or give our office a call at 844-885-4200.
Castle Wealth Group and Christopher Berry help families with estate planning, elder law, retirement planning, and tax planning from their offices in Brighton, Ann Arbor, Livonia, Bloomfield Hills, and Novi.
Castle Wealth Group helps families with their legal, financial, and tax planning for their retirement and legacy.
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Episode Transcript
Estate Planning
Hello, everyone. This is Chris Berry with Castle Wealth Group, and today we’re going to talk about life changes that might warrant an update to your financial or estate plan. And if you like this information, please make sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel, and you can click the notification button to be notified when we have new videos.
Christopher Berry is a leading estate attorney and advisor in the area of retirement and legacy planning. He has been featured in publications, such as Forbes, Kiplinger’s, Crain’s Detroit, and more. He’s the host of the weekly radio show and podcast, The Chris Berry Show. He’s a national thought leader as it relates to retirement and legacy planning and has authored the Amazon best-selling book, The Caregiver’s Legal Guide.
Estate planning and financial planning, it’s not a one and done type deal, unfortunately, because you never know when life’s going to throw you a curve ball, and there’s a lot of changes that can happen in your life. What I’m going to do is outline just a couple of the issues or things that may come up where you might take a chance to review your estate plan or your financial plan or review your insurance or review your beneficiaries just to touch base on these. The first thing is if you’re recently married or divorced, you need to think about beneficiary designations, updating your estate plan. Do you have a financial plan that takes care of what happens if something happens to one spouse versus the other spouse? And a lot of these are driven by family.
Update That Estate Plan
The second thing to think about, have you had a new child? Okay? A new baby. Obviously, that’s a big change. Maybe we should update that estate plan to include that child. Maybe we need to add more life insurance. Maybe we need to review our beneficiaries.
Another reason? A recent death. Maybe you’ve lost a spouse. Maybe you’ve lost an adult child. This would be a time to, again, review beneficiary designations. Review that estate plan. How is that estate plan drafted? If you’ve lost an adult child and they have children, are you providing for those adult children? Called per stirpes, where it flows down the bloodline? Or is it pro rata, where whatever that grandchild would inherit, now it goes to other people? You should review that estate plan for those reasons.
Have you purchased a home? What’s your mortgage? If you purchase a home, we need to figure out how is that titled. If you have a trust, has that been titled in the name of the trust? Do we need to do a new Lady Bird deed, which we’ve talked about in the past? Are you a business owner? Have you opened up a new business? One of the things that we just found out recently in Michigan, as of 2021, is that if you were to move real estate into an LLC, we need to make sure there’s an operating agreement in place.
If you’re a business owner, there’s other things to think about. If you’re a business owner, have you sold a business? Well, obviously, we need to take into account, what are we going to do with the funds? How do we make sure that we manage those properly?
Have you received an inheritance? Maybe you lost a parent. Mom or dad passed away. Now the money has come into your control. Have we invested that properly? Have we protected that properly? Is it in an account that’s fitting into your current estate plan?
Do you support anyone else that has maybe special needs? Do you have a child that has special needs or maybe an elderly family member that now needs longterm care? Or maybe you have a loved one going into a nursing home. Maybe we should think about how can we plan for them, or how can we set up planning for you to be able to take care of that person?
Not a One and One Type Deal
Has there been any change in employment or salary? Have you been laid off? Have you transitioned jobs? Did you leave money at a previous employer in that 401(k), and now we need to roll it over to an IRA? Have you had any children that returned or left the household? Maybe due to the pandemic and everything going on, you’ve had family members move back in, and maybe they’re underemployed now, so there might be some things we need to tweak in terms of that financial plan.
Understand that with life and retirement and legacy planning, it’s not a one and done type deal. It’s not like we did an estate plan, and now we’re good for the rest of our life because things change. Family situations change. Laws change. If your estate plan is older than 2012, I know your financial power of attorney needs to be updated. With all the craziness that’s went on the last couple of years, is your financial plan still good? Do we need to look at tweaking that plan?
Understand that things change, and your retirement and legacy blueprint, your financial and estate plan, it’s like a parachute. You want to make sure there’s no holes in it when you need it. And so now might be a time to get things reviewed. Hopefully this has been helpful. This is Chris Berry with Castle Wealth Group. If you like this information, make sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel
Castle Wealth Group has clients across the nation and helps families plan, protect, and preserve what is important creating by a retirement and legacy blueprint.