4 Essential Estate Planning Tips you Must Follow

No matter how much you avoid making plans for assets and wealth, it’s important to keep everything sorted in advance. The best approach to distribute personal property is via probate court, especially when your house is involved.

In case, you’re seeking some tips on estate planning, keep reading below:

Make clear plans for your property

Out of all the things that you will probably pass on to your heirs, your house is the most important. If you don’t plan to put your house in the will, make sure to includes words like “joint right of survivorship” or “transfer on death”. This will ensure your heirs will not clean your home before the court designates an executor.
 
Don’t forget personal items with objective values

From family heirloom to journal to photograph albums, we all have items that are valuable to us, but not necessarily important to another person. With an estate plan, you get an opportunity to put in writing all little, important things, besides bigger stuff, to be carried out in the way you want. Don’t make a mistake of neglecting or forgetting these items that hold a personal meaning to you.

Be sure to leave a roadmap of your accounts for your heirs to access them

Since we live in the digital world, all payments and account work - including paychecks, bills, credit cards, retirement savings, and insurance policies - are maintained online. This makes navigation and settlements of a person’s financial accounts difficult for family members after he or she dies. To make it easier, there are two things that you can do. First, consolidate all accounts. The fewer accounts you have, the easier for your family to keep track. The second thing that you must do is create a roadmap of your all online accounts. In case, you’re not interested in leaving your credentials in an email account as a catch-all, so that passwords of most accounts can be reset via email.

Verify all your accounts have a beneficiary listed

When you set up accounts, for instance, life insurance policy, you have to give a beneficiary name. It’s important to verify each of your accounts has beneficiaries listed. Some times data mixups during events like companies merging and transferring data from papers to electronic records. For this reason, it’s important to list a beneficiary in writing for each asset at the time of creating an estate plan.

When it comes to estate planning and advice, make sure to follow the given tips. If you’re looking for a professional Fiduciary for risk management and advice, there are plenty of licensed financial planner, you can approach.

Author’s Bio – The author is an online blogger. This article is about estate planning tips.

About This Author

Paul Jardine Joined: December 18th, 2019