Hello. My name is Christopher Lavin. I’m an attorney with the Lavin Law Group. We are an elder law firm here in Lebanon, Ohio, and a big part of elder law is traditional estate planning all the way up to long term care or crisis planning. In the traditional side, unfortunately, a big portion of planning is to brace herself for the death of a loved one.
And I’ll have a lot of families come in when the spouse passes away or the parent passes away. And the biggest thing is how do we administer the estate? And the first thing we do is we try to fill our buckets. We ask questions about the assets, review past documents, and make sure we know the intent of the family, who’s in charge, and where things go.
But then we have to review all the assets. That’s what the estate basically complies of your house, your car, your stock, your bonds, your grandfather clocks. So we have to look at those assets. Now, we’re not picking on the assets. What we have to look at is how their title because how their title directs, how they’re going to pass to the family.
So if I look at the deed, I look for survivor-ship, of course. So I look for TOD or I look to see if it’s in the trust. On financial accounts we look for, again, joint ownership. We look for P.O.D. or pay on death. Same with life insurance. We’ll look for a beneficiary who might be named there because how the assets are titled determine how they’re transferred to the family.
Now, a big part of estate planning nowadays is efficiency. Everybody thinks the will is the only document to have, and it’s not. The will is important because it states your intentions, but it also takes everything through the court process. Nothing good happens in court. So we’re trying to minimize the use of the will nowadays. So if I look at a bank account and it says pay on death to the three children, I know that that’s where it goes.
I don’t even have to look at the will. It doesn’t matter what the will says, even if it says leave everything the Mickey Mouse, that bank accounts go into those three children. If the House has a joint owner, a survivor, and on death, or it’s in trust, I have to look through that. So nowadays, one of the biggest things you want to do is look at how your assets are titled up and see with your advisors on that because that will give you a clue of how they’re going to be transferred or how you can improve the efficiency of how they are transferred.
So please have that reviewed. We’re trying to minimize the use of the will nowadays, saving you some time and expense.