Beneficiaries under an Estate Plan: A Few Things to Consider
Have you thought about your beneficiaries under your estate plan? There may be more to it than meets the eye.
One of the primary objectives of an estate planning lawyer when implementing an estate plan for a client is understandably ensuring that the client’s assets flow to the people or organizations to whom they want them to pass. Most of the time, those beneficiaries are loved ones—spouses, children, significant others—and sometimes they are organizations like charities that hold importance for the client.
Often times, however, life may have other plans. I recently read an article about Chris Ballard, the General Manager for the Indianapolis Colts, and his wife Kristin. They make helping foster children a central tenant of their personal lives, and when the decision to commit to that path arose, Kristin recalls thinking, “We plan, God laughs.”
Isn’t that the truth? As an estate planning attorney, my job is to add predictability to a client’s life to produce a sense of comfort and organization for the future. But often, my job has its own worldly limits. We simply never know how our lives or the lives of those around us will ultimately play out.
So, what’s the point of this little metaphysical anecdote?
Well, in this sense, no matter how much we plan for a certain outcome, we cannot make that outcome more or less likely to occur. Often the plan is to live a long and fulfilling live, and when it’s done, we can leave something for those loved ones that come directly behind us. But, as uncomfortable as the thought it, that’s not always what the universe has in store.
As an estate planning attorney, my job is to try to create predictability in light of that very unpredictable reality. So, when a client tells me he wants everything to go to his spouse when he’s gone, and then when his spouse is gone, everything should go to his children, I commend him for coming to me in the first place to implement that plan.
But next, we need to discuss what happens if life doesn’t play out that way. For example, what if—God forbid—a child predeceases him? What if upon his death he has grandchildren with special needs? What if a predeceased child had been married to a spouse for 20 years and who the client considered his own?
Having the ideal plan for how an estate should be administered and distributed is a tremendous first step. But, there’s more work to be done and more hypothetical questions to explore in the event life doesn’t play out according to our ideal vision.
One of the primary benefits of working with an experienced estate planning attorney to set up a will or trust is that the attorney knows the questions to ask to ensure you’ve thought through any number of possible scenarios the universe may inevitably have in store for our lives. He or she has the ability to stretch that sense of agency and comfort so that it encompasses any number of potential outcomes, no matter how remote they may seem.
Implementing an estate plan is a big accomplishment for any family, but having one prepared by an experienced lawyer that can think about the realities of life that may exist outside of an automated document assembly service provides unmatched peace of mind.
