Category Archives: Estate Planning

Estate Planning Facts. Last Will and Testaments versus Living Trusts. Estate Taxes. Gift Taxes. Inherited IRAs. Guardians for minor children. Pet Trusts. Funeral Agents. Avoiding Probate. Get Your Affairs In Order.

Which state is the first to adopt the revised UFADAA?

Oregon became the first state to adopt the revised Uniform fiduciary Access to Digital Assets Act when Governor Kate Brown signed it into law on March 3, 2016. It will become effective on January 1, 2017.

The revised act is designed to ensure that account holders can retail control of their digital property and can plan for its disposition after their death. It also helps avoid circumstances where online service providers delete deceased’s accounts without authorization or refuse to hand over access and information to permitted fiduciaries.

Will your state be next?

For more information about the revised UFADAA, go to www.diesmart.com.

Do you want to plan your own funeral?

It used to be that if you wanted to plan your own funeral, you would sit down with pen and paper and write down your ideas. The ideas might be very simple or, conversely, completely elaborate. However, they would only be documented on that paper you prepared.

Today there are alternatives. Three of the latest apps that can help you are Everest, Cake and SafeBeyond. These death apps promise to “help a person organize his or her entire online life into a bundle of digital living wills, funeral plans, multimedia memorial portfolios and digital estate arrangements.” In addition, some death apps digitally transmit account passwords to your loved ones after you die.

Another service, Afternote, offers templates so you can create a multimedia tribute about yourself while you’re still alive.

The article I read on this subject had a headline “My name’s Will, and I’m dead.” (See photo above.) While he was still alive, Will left a detailed plan for the funeral he wanted and his family was able to use his plan to make arrangements. He made a video explaining what he’d done and explaining why. After his death, his loved ones watched the video and, although they were upset, the were not as stressed as they would have been if they had to plan the whole thing themselves and guess at what Will would have wanted.

Many people are beginning to incorporate their digital lives into their end of life plans and are recognizing how important a step it is. According to a 2011 McAfee study, the average American valued their digital assets at around $55,000 and had at least 90 online accounts. If the valued assets and access to the online accounts are not documented, they may all be lost after death.

It is important that you start making a plan today. It doesn’t matter whether it’s on paper or developed thru an online software program like one of these. Regardless, you should start planning today.

In addition to looking at software programs, you should read our book Access Denied to find out what you have to do to make sure that your loved ones will have access to everything once you’re gone and check out our website www.diesmart.com.

Can a will be kept private?

In most cases, the answer is no. When a person’s estate is being settled thru the will they prepared, it is usually public record. To keep estate plans secret, they need to be contained in a trust document, not just a will.

However, in the case of Harper Lee, the author of To Kill a Mockingbird, an exception has been made. A probate judge in Alabama where she died signed an order for the will to be sealed after a request from attorneys for Miss Lee’s personal representative. Her family agreed to the request.

She died in February 2016 at the age of 89 and had always been a person who highly valued her privacy.

The release if the ruling from the judge came after there was a “threat of public intrusion and harassment for Lee’s heirs”.

You are probably not a famous author and will not be granted an exception by a probate judge. Therefore, you need to carefully consider whether it is important to you to keep your estate plans within your family or whether it’s okay for them to be public record.

Regardless of what you decide, go to our website www.diesmart.com to get helpful tips about estate planning and other things related to end of life matters.

What’s your most important password?

You may guess it’s the password to your online bank account, to Facebook or to a shopping site. Those are all important but there’s one that it’s critical you share with a loved one. It’s the password to your email account.

Why is this so important? When you die, your loved one or executor will try to access all of your online accounts so that they can close them down or, if necessary, continue their use. For example, they may want to shut down your account on Amazon since you won’t be doing any more shopping. Or, if you pay your utility bills online, they may want to continue to pay them until they sell your home.

You may use the same login information and password for all of your accounts but chances are that you have several different ones. However, most of the accounts have a system that will enable a user to recover a forgotten login or password. The user just needs to know how to access the email account linked to that other site so he or she can recover the information when it is sent out.

Although it is not strictly legal for you to share your password and login information, it is the easiest way to ensure that when you’re gone, your executor will be able to easily access your information and settle your estate.

For more information about digital estates and the steps you should take to be sure you have included them in your planning process, check out our book “Access Denied ” or go to our site www.diesmart.com.

Do presidents forget to write their wills?

Even though more than 50% of US citizens still don’t have a will, you’d think that the presidents of the United States, with all of their legal advisors and staff, would definitely have protected their property by preparing one.

Not true – Abraham Lincoln, Andrew Johnson, William Garfield and Ulysses S. Grant did not!

Two presidents who did leave wills freed slaves in them. George Washington left his entire estate to his wife Martha. He requested that, upon her death, all of their 317 slaves should receive their freedom.

Thomas Jefferson actually freed some of his slaves in his will – 3 older men who worked for him for decades and two of Sally Heming’s four children.

Most other presidents left fairly standard wills, leaving their assets to family members, though a few left special bequests.

Richard Nixon bequeathed his personal diaries to the Richard Nixon Library and Thomas Jefferson gave his friend and former president James Madison his gold-mounted walking staff.

Regardless of what presidents have or have not done, you should definitely consider getting a will prepared today. Otherwise, the government will decide what happens to your assets, not you.

For more information about wills and other end-of-life planning, go the www.diesmart.com.