What Do You Mean By Elder Law Estate Planning 101?

This blog talks to you about some issues related to the ageing process and the elder law. Specifically, we will talk about the dreaded issue of dying, as it is said, in life, there are only two things that are certain death and taxes. 

Elder Law Estate Planning

When you die you have some issue that your family needs to deal with and specifically where does your stuff, how does it get there and who is in charge of making sure that it gets there. This is what is called estate planning.  Nobody likes to talk about it but its an important issue you have something in place for your family to make that process smooth as possible and to be honest as cost-effective as possible. 

Where an attorney discusses estate planning with their clients they usually use a metaphor of a ladder. So if you can imagine a ladder leaning up against a wall, there are various rungs up on that ladder and each one of them represents a different way of planning for your estate. 

One of the challenges in dealing with estate planning is that there are multiple ways to get to your solution determining which is the right way is the difficult question.

Now you when you start with the ladder sitting on the ground, there is that ground level, now the ground level is what we called doing nothing. To be quite straight with you guys, doing nothing is an option. 

You don’t have to do anything your estate will get to your hair without you doing anything, there is something in the law called, the law of intestacy that says that “if you die, or when you die your assets will descend to your hairs according to a certain scheme or hierarchy”, isn’t it something that we would normally think, like our wife or kids, to them without the necessity of using a will. 

Well oftentimes it is not recommended to “do nothing”, but if you have a very simple estate with not too many assets or many hairs doing nothing may be an okay strategy. 

However, if you are like most people you are a little bit more complicated in your world. Moving up that ladder, the next rung is called the joint ownership. Owning you assets jointly with somebody else is a way of having an estate plan.

Most of us do this without even knowing it, will have our assets with our spouse, or as we age we may add our children to our assets, why are you all doing that? You are doing that to make, quite frankly, to assure that if when you die, those assets to your hairs, easily because they are already a joint owner on that account. 

This is again good if you have fairly simple assets, you have one or two bank accounts and one or two hairs, this is an okay way of solving the problem. But if you add any further complications to this situation you may need to move up the ladder. 

Apart from them what you can do is add a beneficiary designation on your account. This is another way of owning assets jointly. If you have a stock account or if you have a bank account, or a  savings account, you can go to your bank and add a beneficiary designation on that account.