5 Overlooked Items To Include With Your Estate Plan

5 Overlooked Items to Include with your Estate Plan

By Melinda Gustafson Gervasi

October 11, 2021

Estate planning is the act of taking control of paperwork related to illness, death and taxes.  The obvious documents include things such as a power of attorney for health care, durable power of attorney for finances, beneficiary forms, a will, and sometimes a trust.  If you are looking to have an well organized plan that offers easy access to documents to ease the burden of your final affairs on your loved ones, consider including the following with these otherwise obvious documents:

1. Copy of your state and federal income taxes for the past 3 - 5 years.  The include information on your accountant and assets that generated a loss or gain that may not otherwise be found;
2. Deed to your home, cabin, or other real estate.  The deed will be needed at some point during the handling for your affairs, and finding it now allows you to review the wording to confirm it says what you think it says.  For example, is the cabin you inherited from your mom in your name or your name at that of your spouse?  That wording may or may not cause problems for your surviving spouse;
3. Copies of your health, disability, life, and burial insurance.  Having copies of these documents provides the person/entity handling your estate with documentation of what your policies did and did not cover;
4. Instructions on personal possessions that may not be of obvious value to your loved ones.  For example, my husband is a hardware electronics engineer with an entire work area full of gadgets.  I've paid enough attention to know some of those instruments can be worth tens-of-thousands of dollar.  Yet, I know that if I were grieving his untimely death I may not have enough mental recall to know which ones were and were not worth any significant value.  What possessions might you have that would be worth the time and effort to liquidate but not be obvious?
5. Copies of beneficiary forms for your retirement and other investment accounts. Beneficiary forms are essentially a contract between you, the owner, and the company that holds and manages your asset, stating where it will go upon your death.  When you maintain a copy of the form there is proof in your records of where you designated the asset to pass upon your death.  When you fail to maintain a copy of the form, you are leaving it up to the company to document its existence.  Mistakes can and do happen.  One too many times I have seen a loved one struggle with the fact a beneficiary form for a life insurance policy cannot be found and it is distributed in a manner that contradicts what the loved one had been told.  

Image by M. Gustafson Gervasi, 2021

Thank you for reading.  Remember that a blog is not legal advice, but rather a tool to spark discussion and conversation.  Please seek legal counsel from an attorney in your state of residence for advice specific to your situation.