Happy Sunday!

Today I want to talk about a question we get all the time here at the firm – “Why are estate plans so long? It seems like simpler is better.”

It’s a great question, and today we’re going to answer it (briefly! No long lawyery answers here!).

I’d say there are three reasons estate plans are so long.

First, this plan is designed to describe your wishes and appoint people to represent you and your family when you cannot speak for yourselves.

To do this successfully requires precision and specificity.

Unfortunately, the only way to achieve these ends is by describing things in such a way that there is no ambiguity.

Translation = it takes longer to say what you want to say to ensure everyone understands what you’re saying.

Second, there are hundreds of years of estate planning mistakes in the past that have alerted/taught us attorneys where things can go sideways.

Many of the paragraphs in your estate plan provide clarity for those types of situations – situations that are unlikely to come up in your family, but if they do, you’d want very clear direction on what to do.

Every time something unexpected happens another paragraph is added to the plan to account for it.

Third, and finally, there are just a lot of moving parts when it comes to estate planning.

Asset maintenance and distribution. Guardianship. Probate. Health care decisions. End of life decisions. Burial decisions.

All of that requires language not just to ensure each individual job is done right, but that all of the individual jobs work in concert with each other and don’t overlap in unintended ways.

If done right, your big complex estate plan will allow you and your family to do exactly what you want very simply, AND provide assurance that if anything out of the ordinary happens it has been accounted for.

Hope this helps!

Have a great week!

Cheers,

Christopher Small
Founder/CEO
CMS Law Firm LLC

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