Estate Planning Stratagies

CAN I DO IT MYSELF?

You sure can!

Anyone has the right to draft their own estate planning documents, whether they know what they are doing or not! It is just the mistakes that can be the problem. With the growth of the internet, do-it-yourself form programs, kits, and books have become widely available. All you have to do with the programs is fill in the blanks, print the documents, have them notarized, then you are all set....right?.....or are you?

While do-it-yourself trusts are readily available, they also pose a significant danger. Do-it-yourself trusts are often distributed nationally and not based on any particular state's laws (or for that matter, there is no real guarantee that they are based upon any laws at all).

If the documents are flawed or ineffective, or throw your estate into an expensive and unnnecessary probate, who is liable? Is it Joe's Trust Publishing Corporation in Mazula, Montana that you bought the documents from on the internet? Nope. It is you the drafter. At least if you do draft a set of defective trust documents, the only time that anyone will find out that they did not work correctly is after your dead.

A trip to the law library would reveal that there are shelves and shelves filled with books on drafting trusts. There is no possible way that a single book on trust drafting, or a do-it-yourself at home computer program, could begin to cover the many aspects of estate planning and taxation that must be considered in drafting any quality estate plan....even one for a small and simple estate.
 
In my 25+ years of practice, I have seen many do-it-yourself sets of trust documents. Some, I have seen while the drafters are still alive and able to correct the flaws that would have caused disastrous results before they happened. The only loss was the amount wasted that was paid for the do-it-yourself trust.  Others, I have seen when their family brought the documents to me for advice after they had died. In that case, the problem with defective documents is often far worse.

One thing I can say for sure is that the amount of legal fees charged by an attorney to draft a quality, sound, legally effective estate plan is but a small fraction of what it costs to have an attorney try to straighten out the mess caused by a poorly written one after the trustor has died, and of course some cannot be straightened out.

It does not brighten my day to have to tell a widow that she will have to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars in federal estate tax that she would not have had to, if her husband's trust document had not included just one sentence that was a fatal flaw and that now there is no way, at any price to correct the error.

You do not do your own surgery, or fill your own cavities; why would you take the chance of writing your own trust?  The potential for harm from making a serious error, or overlooking some important point of law while drafting your own trust far outweighs the value of the potential benefit.

It was Abraham Lincoln that said: "The man that represents himself has a fool for a client." I am quite sure that also applies to the woman that represents herself as well,  and it is advice well heeded.