San Fernando Valley Probate & Estate Administration Law Blog

Remember how excited you were when you finally got your California estate plan created and established? You likely felt as if a giant burden had fallen off your shoulders. You knew you had perfectly set up your will, trusts, powers of attorney and all your other legal documents so as to ensure protection of yourself and your family, both now and in the future, to the greatest extent possible.

Unfortunately, even the best estate plan needs occasional updating. As Fidelity explains, experts recommend that you review your estate plan at least every three to five years. Why? Because people and their lives inevitably change over time.

As you age, you may feel more and more appreciative of the fact that your parents are still around. Many people lose their parents at young ages and others are fortunate enough to live a considerable portion of their lives with at least one parent in the picture. While you understand that your parents will not live forever, you may wish that they could.

Of course, as you get older, so do your parents, and the likelihood of one or both of them needing long-term care is a real possibility. While you may feel that you could provide the care that they may need, you may want to remember that the need for care may not come about until you reach retirement age yourself.

If you and your spouse are like most California parents, you make every effort to raise your children to become responsible adults, financially and otherwise. Unfortunately, these lessons do not always take with some kids, particularly when it comes to handling money responsibly. Today’s “I want it now and I don’t want to wait” culture provides your children with an influence every bit as large as your own more conservative and wise approaches to spending.

Should you now find yourself in the position of having considerable wealth to pass down to your children but not trusting what they might do with it, you may wish to consider establishing a spendthrift trust for each of your kids. As reported by Forbes, you can do this now by means of inter vivos trusts, i.e., those you set up during your lifetime, or by means of your will and/or other testamentary documents.

As you go about establishing your California estate plan, you likely will come face to face with the issue of trusts sooner rather than later. As reported in U.S. News, all trusts are stand-alone legal entities, meaning that they and the assets you put into them are separate and apart from you personally. Trusts come in two basic types: revocable and irrevocable.

As its name implies, when you set up a revocable trust, you can add or remove assets from it and change its provisions any time you wish in the future, as well as the person or entity you designate as trustee. Conversely, when you set up an irrevocable trust, you relinquish all control over both the assets in it and the trustee who manages and distributes those assets. In other words, an irrevocable trust is “set in stone” once you establish it.