The Cost of NOT Estate Planning

Depending on you and your family’s needs, comprehensive estate planning can cost anywhere in the ballpark of $500 to $5,000… I hear you, that’s a lot! However, much like the cost of getting preventative healthcare versus leaving a health concern unaddressed until it becomes an emergency, the cost of NOT doing estate planning can be more than 100x the amount it would cost to take care of it upfront. I have personally seen probate cases where the deceased did not have any estate planning in place when they died, and it cost their family years of ugly litigation fighting over family heirlooms and real property… in all, costing them more than $50,000 between executor fees, attorney fees, and court costs, not to mention the heartache and lost financial opportunities due to forced sales and partitions which greatly devalued those properties.

Time

Taking care of your estate planning ensures that your spouse, children, and other heirs receive their inheritance as quickly and efficiently as possible, without having to wait several months or years to access bank accounts, real property, and personal property that they may need. With a beneficiary deed or trust, your family can usually receive the assets you leave to them within a few days or weeks. Without an estate plan, however, the minimum time for most probate processes (if you leave only a will or nothing at all) is six months, which is the required notice period for potential creditors to make a claim against the estate, and usually the timeline is a year or longer — especially if there are any disputes between heirs or creditors.

Money

If you don’t create an estate plan to keep your assets out of probate, several people will have to be paid off the top of your estate before any of your family receives any inheritance. First, the executor can ask for 3-10% of the estate value as a fee for carrying the case through the complicated probate process. Second, attorney’s fees are typically 3-5%. Lastly, court costs like filing fees, professional appraisals, etc. will be necessary. Together these costs and fees can eat up several thousand dollars, taking money and assets away from your family’s inheritance. This is worsened further by lost financial opportunities due to forced sales and partitions, which greatly devalue properties that could have been sold as a whole for a higher profit or enjoyed by future generations of your family with careful estate planning.

Privacy

Probate proceedings are public record, so if you do nothing or create only a will, that will be entered into public record, and an inventory of all your valuable earthly belongings will be created and published for the court to divvy up the property. Perhaps worst, if family members get into contentious litigation fighting over your property, those disagreements can get very heated and even change people’s reputations in the community. Some people say they don’t care because they won’t be around to care what anyone thinks, whereas others prefer to keep their belongings and affairs private by choosing to do a trust or other bundle of estate planning such as powers of attorney and beneficiary deeds instead.

Heartache

Perhaps the most important reason to work with a trusted attorney to take care of your estate planning is to protect your family from as much future heartache as possible. The grief process is hard enough without the added stress and complications of lengthy probate proceedings, which open family members up to internal disagreements over who should get what and long wait times for potential creditors to make claims. Sitting down with an experienced estate planning attorney and making a plan for how you want to handle your estate now and in the future can save everyone a lot of time and hurt by giving the court and family members clear instructions on what you want to happen with your belongings when you’re gone.

Avoid This Costly Mistake, Make an Estate Plan!

Estate planning doesn’t have to be super complicated, nor super expensive. And whatever estate plan needs you have, I can almost guarantee that setting it up now will save your family multiples of that cost in future. Call or email my office for a free consultation, and let me help you figure out what you need to do to avoid the high cost of not doing any estate planning!