PLANNING FOR WEALTH & SECURITY
By attorneys Jennifer & Jeff Hawkins
 
Self-Help Nightmares in Estate and Trust Planning and Administration

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to understand why people want to handle their own legal affairs. Professional services are expensive, whether medical, accounting, legal, or architectural. Common sense tells you that it should not take a complicated procedure or expensive system to plan how to distribute your assets to your family and how to authorize others to help you if you become disabled. So why should anyone hire a professional if they can find the resources to take care of their own business?

Estate planning affects a wide range of subjects that includes real estate, banking, insurance, investments, taxation, government regulations, and more than 100 years worth of legal decisions issued by state and federal courts. It takes a lawyer three years of intensive study and examination in law school and many years of professional development after law school to become proficient in advising and assisting clients in estate planning and administrative matters. Often, a seemingly simple issue involves numerous, complex, and hidden consequences.

Some examples show these problems best. You might want to put a person’s name on your checking account or investment account so that that person may take care of your business for you if you become disabled. This plan causes that person to receive all of your wealth when you die to the exclusion of all of your other intended beneficiaries (it is a bad idea in most cases). If you make a deed to transfer your home to your children, you may disqualify yourself from critical assistance to pay for nursing home care in a few years. If you prepare estate plan documents for another person, you are committing a crime that is punishable by up to a year in prison and a substantial fine.

Self-help with government agencies can be an unbelievable headache in many cases. For example, if a loved one enters a nursing home, the process for qualifying that person for benefits to pay for nursing home care requires extensive detective work to gather information necessary for the Medicaid application. Government agencies tend to be very unforgiving of mistakes. If you file a document with an agency that is prepared incorrectly or if you provide the wrong information or withhold important information from the agency, you may be treated very badly and you may find it difficult or nearly impossible to persuade the agency to allow you to correct your error. Many agencies have almost no accountability to the people they serve and a consumer of the agency’s services may be unable to contact a responsible individual to monitor case status and exchange vital information.

An experienced elder law or estate planning and administration attorney has experienced and well-trained staff that are equipped to sort out the important issues and minimize costly procedures and frustrating delays. Legal services can be very expensive sometimes, but quite often the usefulness or quality of what you get relates directly to the cost of getting it. In other words, you get what you pay for.

THIS ARTICLE IS NOT LEGAL ADVICE. ALWAYS CONSULT AN ATTORNEY DIRECTLY BEFORE RELYING UPON THIS ARTICLE OR CHANGING AN ESTATE PLAN.

© 2009 by HAWKINS LAW PC, Estate, Trust & Business Attorneys. All rights reserved.