Estate Plan Destroyed
How do you destroy your own well-crafted, strategically created, solid estate plan in one move? In this podcast, I cover how one of our most airtight estate plans explicitly drafted to benefit a grandson with special needs ended up being placed in jeopardy… because the clients decided to perform their own DIY surgery on their documents.
This was handled correctly, all the way through, except they went off the rails with this one thing. The clients did this one thing they knew I didn’t want them to do and they hid it from me, and now there are some disastrous consequences that came about.
He Knew Best
I worked with a client for more than one and a half years to put together his estate plan, and he was challenging me every step of the way, all throughout the document. No matter how much I ended up going through everything with him and why it was structured the particular way he tested it constantly.
“Well, the language sounds confusing to me.” And there’s the biggest problem because it is not being read by you the client, it is being ready by attorneys and judges and other legal professionals who understand all this. I run into this quite often.
The legal language while it may sound convoluted, and over-blown, it is because the legalese is crafted in such a way that not only is it saying what you want it to say, but it is specifically excluding other types of interpretations that someone may try to push in there. So it’s not just saying what it is, it is being very clear about saying what it isn’t!