Regardless of your situation and goals, creating an estate plan can be a complicated process that brings a lot of stress to your life. Fortunately, when you take the right approach, this doesn’t have to be the case.
There are many ways to make it through the estate planning process without facing a mound of anxiety.
It’s important to prevent every potential estate planning mistake, as this will give you peace of mind now and in the future.
Here are the types of mistakes that many people before you have made:
- Overlooking blind spots, such as tax complications and the probate process
- Neglecting to create an estate plan early in life, assuming that you’ll always have time in the future
- Forgetting to update your estate plan at key times, such as when you reach retirement age, go through divorce or bring a child into the world
- Not planning for disability, because there is more to estate planning than what happens after you pass on
- Selecting the wrong executor
- Selecting the wrong guardian for your minor children
You can see how simple it would be for one of these estate planning mistakes to slip through the cracks.
For example, you get so caught up in creating a will that you overlook how important it is to name a guardian for your child.
Since there are so many mistakes lurking, you need to understand the estate planning process and your legal rights. With this knowledge, it’s much easier to make confident decisions that will benefit you and your family now and many years into the future.
If you find that you made an estate planning mistake in the past, the best thing you can do is review what went wrong and create a plan for making it right.
You don’t want to make a mistake, but it’s good to know you can fix anything. This is better than the alternative of sticking with a flawed plan and hoping for the best.