Estate Planning involves four core documents:

1.  Durable Power of Attorney for Finance -With this power, the person you name will be responsible for managing your money and property on your behalf if you are incapacitated.  This may avoid the need for a court-ordered conservatorship of your estate, a potentially expensive and time-consuming public process.

2.  Advance Health Care Directive - Your directive tells medical providers who will be your voice for medical decisions if you are unable to speak for yourself.  This may avoid the need for a court-ordered conservatorship of your person.

3.  Revocable Trust - A trust provides a way for your estate to avoid the cost and public forum of probate (court supervised estate administration) and conservatorship of your estate proceedings.

4.  Will - Without a trust, your will describes who gets your property, and how, when you die.  With a trust, it functions as a safety net to ensure that your trust provisions will apply.

Probate and Trust Administration

Probate is the public court process of administering someone's estate after they die.  Following certain rules and timelines, this process provides an orderly distribution of the decedent's property.  This is a public process and all the paperwork submitted to the court, including the decedent's inventory of property, becomes part of the public record.

Trust Administration is the corollary to probate.  With a properly crafted and maintained trust, you can avoid the public process of probate.

Document Reviews

If you have an estate plan in place, you should have those documents reviewed at least once every few years.  As your life changes, you may not realize how those changes affect your estate planning documents.

If you review your documents and update them as needed, your plan will work as you intended, efficiently and effectively.  A well-crafted estate plan makes things much easier for those you leave behind.

At Placer Law Group, APC, we will gladly review your existing plan and let you know our recommendations for making sure that plan will work as efficiently as possible for you and your loved ones.