Let's face it, estate plans can go horribly wrong. The reasons why can be simple - doing no planning, doing your own planning, doing cheap planning - or complicated - under or over planning, misjudging family greed and jealousy, choosing the wrong people to carry out your wishes. For those who do take the time to make an estate plan, my job as an estate planning attorney is to determine the wants and needs of the client as well as the wants and needs of the client's family. And that's where the problems begin - I only get one side of the story, and what the client perceives their family wants and needs can be far from the reality of what they really want and need. So what goes on in an estate planning attorney's office is often a fictional portrayal of what the client perceives is the ultimate estate plan for their family, or, on the opposite end of the spectrum, what the estate planning attorney perceives is the ultimate estate plan for the client's family.
As the saying goes, "Truth is stranger than fiction." Stay tuned over the next few weeks as I cover 10 estate planning myths and how they should be handled when estate planning is done for the real world.