What Is An Estate Planning Attorney?

Estate planning can ensure that your family is aware of your wishes in the event of your incapacitation or death. While it seems simple on the surface, most people get quickly overwhelmed by the complexity of the matter at hand. 

Fortunately, you don’t have to face the challenges of estate planning alone, as you can always rely on the help of an estate planning attorney. 

Join us as we explore what is an estate planning attorney, how they can help you, and why you should leverage their services. 

What Do Estate Planning Attorneys Do?

Let’s address the original query first - what is an estate planning attorney?

In simple terms, it’s a legal professional specializing in end-of-life planning who can help educate individuals in the process of estate planning and the laws that apply to the transfer, taxation, and disbursement of the estate. 

An estate planning attorney will work with their clients to create a fully customized estate plan that addresses the client’s specific needs. 

Mattersan Estate Planning Attorney Can Help You With

Now that you know what is an estate planning attorney, let’s check out what they can do for you:

1. Drafting a Last Will

An estate planning attorney can make sure that your last will is drafted, properly signed, and executed under state laws. Furthermore, they’ll advise you on your legal options and how you can better protect your assets by adjusting the contents of this document. 

2. Drafting Trusts and Other Legal Documents

To fully protect one’s assets, an attorney can draft a variety of different documents. One of the most common ones is a living trust. 

This type of trust addresses your wishes while you’re still alive and provides you with the ability to assign your assets to a loved one they can’t access until you pass away. In addition, you can also put provisions in place that someone must meet before receiving the assets in question. For instance, you can give $100k to your son but stipulate that they can only access the assets once they graduate from college. 

Another common asset management tool is a medical or healthcare power of attorney. It provides a person with the ability to make choices regarding healthcare decisions if you become incapacitated. This includes on-the-fly medical decisions, along with long-term decisions about your care. 

3. Helping You Minimize Estate Taxes

An estate planning attorney will utilize various types of tools to minimize your estate and probate taxes. This may include trusts, joint property ownerships, use of death beneficiaries, and lifetime gifts. 

4. Ensuring a Smooth Probate Process

Generally speaking, probate is a stressful process that could take over a year and may end up costing your family a lot of money. By carefully planning your estate while you’re alive, you can prevent legal battles, unnecessary expenses, and keep family disagreements in the future to a minimum. 

5. Reducing the Chance of Legal Disputes 

It’s not uncommon for some loved ones to be unhappy with the contents of your wills and trust. As a result, they may attempt to challenge your will in court. With an estate planning attorney, you can see to it that your wishes stay protected when such disputes arise. 

Do You Need an Estate Plan?

Contrary to popular belief, an estate plan is not only for extremely wealthy individuals. In fact, it can be even more beneficial to those with a moderate amount of assets. 

Many also have a misconception that they shouldn’t worry about estate planning until they reach retirement age. However, it’s impossible to predict how long you’ll live and whether you’ll have an accident or suffer a sudden ailment. People experience incapacity of some sort all the time, regardless of whether it’s temporary or permanent. 

Can You Make an Estate Plan on Your Own?

The short answer is yes. Considering there are plenty of DIY templates online that will simplify the process of drafting legal documents, you may be able to create an estate plan.

Still, this doesn’t mean you should. While saving money on legal fees is great, without a legal professional, you’ll have no idea if the legal document you drafted is valid and whether it will hold up in court. 

In other words, with enough time and research, you could perform surgery on yourself, but it doesn’t mean that would be a good idea. The same thing applies to estate planning. 

By relying on online forms, you can also inadvertently make serious mistakes, such as accidentally leaving out certain assets or even people out of the estate plan. All of these errors will cause you to pay more later on for damage control. So in a way, any savings you make from using DIY forms will be rendered nil once you have to pay an estate attorney to review and update your forms. 

Lastly, estate planning is rarely a set-it-and-forget-it type of deal. Your life circumstances and wishes could change, and so can your family dynamics, meaning that an estate plan should change accordingly. Plus, laws change and so can the tax code. By working with an estate planning attorney, you can make sure that your estate plan reflects not only your wishes but the times as well. 

Start Estate Planning With the Law Offices of Mary E. King

Now that you’re fully familiar with what is an estate planning attorney and how they can help, you can make the best decision for your family. With an estate plan, you get to protect yourself and your family’s financial security for many years to come. This provides you with the necessary piece of mind that the ones you love the most are well-taken care of even when you’re no longer around. 

There’s only one thing remaining, though - finding an estate planning attorney who can draft your legal documents and safeguard your interests in court if needed. Attorneys at Law Offices Of Mary E. King can do both. 

When in doubt, always choose someone with experience, and experience is something we have in abundance, having worked in the field for close to two decades. 

Start planning for the future now - call 941-906-7585 or fill out our contact form.

Note: 

The information in this blog post is for reference only and not legal advice. As such, you should not make legal decisions based on the information in this blog post. Moreover, there is no lawyer-client relationship resulting from this blog post, nor should any such relationship be implied. If you need legal counsel, please consult a lawyer licensed to practice in your jurisdiction.