August is Make-A-Will Month, and if it finally motivated you to create a will, that was an important step.
But having a will is not the same thing as having a complete estate plan.
This is where many families get caught off guard. They sign a will, put it somewhere safe, and assume everything is handled. Then a serious illness, incapacity, or death occurs, and the family discovers that the will covered only one part of a much bigger picture.
If you recently created a will, especially a California will, here are the other pieces you should review to make sure your estate plan will actually work when your family needs it.
What Does a Will Actually Do in California?
A will is an important estate planning document. It allows you to say who should receive certain assets after your death, name the person you want to handle your estate, and, if you have minor children, nominate the people you would want to serve as their guardians.
What a will does not do is keep your family out of probate.
In California, assets that pass under your will may still have to go through probate before they can be distributed. Probate is a court proceeding that can take many months, involves court oversight, and can add significant expense and administrative work at a time when your family is already grieving.
Your will also does not necessarily control everything you own.
Retirement accounts, life insurance policies, certain financial accounts, jointly owned property, and other assets may pass according to their own beneficiary designation or form of ownership rather than according to your will.
And your will does not help you during your lifetime.
If you become seriously ill, are injured in an accident, develop dementia, or otherwise become unable to manage your own affairs, your will does not give someone authority to handle your finances or make healthcare decisions for you.
That is why a will is one part of an estate plan, not the estate plan itself.
1. Review Your Beneficiary Designations
One of the first things I look at when reviewing an estate plan is something many people overlook entirely: beneficiary designations.
Retirement accounts, life insurance policies, and certain other financial accounts allow you to name the person or people who should receive the asset when you die. Those assets generally pass according to the beneficiary designation rather than under your will.
That means you could have a carefully drafted will saying exactly what you want while an old beneficiary designation sends a significant asset somewhere else.
And those old designations are surprisingly easy to forget.
Maybe you named your parents when you opened your first retirement account 25 years ago. Perhaps you named a former spouse. Maybe a beneficiary has died. Or perhaps you named your children directly without thinking through what would happen if one of them were still young when you died.
There may also be reasons you do not want an inheritance going directly to a beneficiary. A child may be young or financially inexperienced. A beneficiary may have special needs, struggle with addiction, have creditor problems, or be going through an unstable marriage.
How an inheritance is received can be just as important as who receives it.
Every retirement account, life insurance policy, and other beneficiary-designated asset should be reviewed as part of your overall estate plan. You should know who the primary and contingent beneficiaries are and whether those designations still accomplish what you intend.
Your beneficiary designations and your estate plan should work together.
2. If You Have a Living Trust, Make Sure It Is Funded
If you created a revocable living trust along with your will, ask yourself one very important question:
Is my trust actually funded?
Signing a trust does not automatically move your assets into it.
Think of your trust as a legal container. Creating the trust establishes the container. Funding the trust means making sure the appropriate assets are actually connected to it.
Your home may need to be transferred to the trust by deed. Bank and investment accounts may need to be retitled. Business interests may require additional documentation. Retirement accounts generally are not transferred into a revocable living trust during your lifetime, but their beneficiary designations should be coordinated with the rest of your estate plan.
This distinction matters because a living trust can only avoid probate for assets that are properly connected to it or otherwise structured to pass outside probate.
I have seen families come to me after someone dies carrying a perfectly valid trust they believed would keep them out of court, only to discover that the house was never transferred into the trust or accounts opened years later were never addressed.
The trust existed. The assets never made it into the plan.
Trust funding is also not necessarily a one-time event. You may refinance your home, open new accounts, buy another property, start a business, or acquire other assets years after signing your trust.
A trust should stay connected to the life and assets you actually have.
3. Plan for Incapacity, Not Just Death
Estate planning is not only about what happens after you die.
Some of the most difficult situations I help families navigate happen while a loved one is still very much alive.
Imagine that you are injured in an accident and temporarily unable to manage your finances. Who can pay your mortgage, deal with your insurance company, handle your business, or manage your accounts?
What if you develop dementia and gradually lose the ability to make financial decisions?
What if you are unconscious in the hospital and cannot communicate your healthcare wishes?
Your will cannot help with any of those situations.
That is why a complete California estate plan should include incapacity planning.
A durable power of attorney allows you to give someone you trust authority to handle financial and legal matters for you.
An Advance Health Care Directive allows you to name the person you want to make healthcare decisions if you cannot make them yourself and gives you an opportunity to communicate your wishes regarding your care.
I also include a HIPAA authorization so the appropriate people can obtain medical information when necessary.
If you have a living trust, it should also explain how trust assets will be managed if you become incapacitated and when your successor trustee can step in.
Without the right documents in place, the people who love you can find themselves facing an urgent problem without the legal authority they need to solve it.
Good incapacity planning gives them that authority before the emergency happens.
4. Choose the Right People to Carry Out Your Plan
Having the right documents is only part of estate planning. You also need to think carefully about the people you have put in charge.
Who should manage your trust when you no longer can?
Who should handle your finances?
Who should make healthcare decisions if you cannot speak for yourself?
Who should care for your children if something happens to you?
These are not questions you should answer simply because a form requires you to type in a name.
A successor trustee may eventually be responsible for managing investments, handling real estate, keeping records, dealing with taxes, communicating with beneficiaries, and deciding when distributions should be made.
Someone can be a wonderful person and still be the wrong trustee.
I have seen people name aging parents to manage trusts that could continue for decades. Others automatically choose the oldest child even though another child may be far better suited for the responsibility. Sometimes people name two family members together because they do not want anyone to feel left out, without considering whether those two people will actually be able to make difficult decisions together.
The same thought should go into choosing your financial and healthcare agents.
The question is not simply, “Who do I love and trust?”
It is also, “Who can actually do this job?”
That conversation is one of the most important parts of thoughtful estate planning.
5. Review Your Estate Plan as Your Life Changes
Even an excellent estate plan can stop working if no one reviews it.
Your life does not stand still.
You buy and sell property. Children grow up. Grandchildren arrive. Relationships change. People get married or divorced. Beneficiaries die. Your financial circumstances change. Someone you once thought would be the perfect successor trustee may no longer be the right choice ten years later.
The law changes too.
When I work with families through Life & Legacy Planning®, we review their plans at least every three years. We look at what has changed, confirm that the people named in the plan are still appropriate, review beneficiary designations, make sure new assets have been incorporated into the plan, and determine whether the plan still accomplishes what the family wants.
Certain life events should prompt an earlier review, including marriage, divorce, the birth or adoption of a child, receiving a significant inheritance, acquiring substantial new property, the death of someone named in your plan, a major change in health, or moving to another state.
Your estate plan should reflect the family, assets, and life you have today, not the life you had when you originally signed it.
Why an Online Will Is Only a Starting Point
If you created your will through an online platform or document-generating service, taking that step was better than continuing to put estate planning off.
But creating a document and creating an estate plan are two different things.
A form can ask who you want to name as your executor. It cannot fully evaluate whether that person is realistically suited for the responsibility.
It can ask you to name beneficiaries. It does not know that one beneficiary has special needs, another is going through a difficult marriage, or another may not be prepared to receive a large inheritance outright.
It does not know whether your house is properly titled, whether your living trust has been funded, whether an old retirement beneficiary designation is inconsistent with your current wishes, or whether the people you named years ago still make sense.
And it cannot sit down with you and work through what would actually happen to the people you love under different circumstances.
That is where estate planning goes beyond documents.
When I meet with a family for a Life & Legacy Planning Session, I look at the full picture: what you own, who matters to you, what would happen if you became incapacitated, what would happen when you die, who would be responsible for carrying out your wishes, and where there may be gaps that could result in unnecessary court involvement, expense, or family conflict.
The goal is not an impressive binder filled with legal documents.
The goal is a plan that works.
You Made the Will. Now Make Sure the Rest of Your Estate Plan Works Too.
If Make-A-Will Month motivated you to finally create your will, keep going.
Review your beneficiary designations. Determine whether a living trust is appropriate for you and, if you already have one, make sure it is properly funded. Put the right incapacity documents in place. Look carefully at the people you have named to act for you. And make sure all of these pieces continue to work together as your life changes.
If you are not sure whether the documents you already have will accomplish what you intended, bring them with you.
During a Life & Legacy Planning Session, we will review what you have in place, identify what may still be missing, and look at your family, your assets, and your wishes as a whole.
Because estate planning is not really about whether you have a will.
It is about whether the people you love will have the legal authority, information, and guidance they need when the time comes.
At Cheever Law, APC, we don’t just draft documents; we ensure you make informed and empowered decisions about life and death for yourself and the people you love, starting with a valuable and educational Life & Legacy Planning Session. The Life & Legacy Planning Session will allow you to get more financially organized and make the best choices for the people you love. If you have already completed your estate plan, we will review that plan at your Life & Legacy Planning Session to ensure that it will work the way you intend and address any holes or gaps that may be present if circumstances have changed since you executed your plan.
To learn more about our one-of-a-kind systems and services, contact us or schedule a 15-minute introductory call today. you love means planning with clarity – not guesswork.