Most of the estate planning lawyers stress the saving of estate tax as the main reason that you need to get your estate planning done. For the vast majority of you, there may be no estate tax due. Or if you have enough assets to be required to pay New Jersey state estate tax (the threshold is $675,000), you still don’t believe that this should be a concern. I’m here to tell you that estate planning should not be just for the people that have to pay estate tax. It should be for everyone.
Granted, the documents don’t need to be so elaborate if you are not doing tax planning. But estate planning is not about the documents, it’s about the advice you get from a lawyer as to how best to accomplish your goals.
Every person has different goals for their estate. Married couples have different needs from single people and marrieds with children have different needs from marrieds without children. If you have a blended family, that’s a whole different set of advice.
You go to an estate planning lawyer so that you can ask your questions about how to make the most of your assets while you are alive and how to pass them on when you have passed on. It’s not about the documents, it’s about the questions that you ask, the questions that you didn’t know to ask, and the advice that your lawyer will give you.
Without the answers to your questions, you don’t know exactly what documents you need and how they should be drafted. So yes, every person over 18 needs some legal advice about what they need to do to protect themselves if they can’t do things for themselves anymore (think bad car accident) or if they pass on. And that is estate planning.
Tags: durable power of attorney, Estate planning, Health care proxy, living will, will
