Nolo's Guide to Estate Planning

Introduction

Why Write This Book, Anyway?

Our Families

Our Homes

Our (Personal) International Relations

What Will I Get out of This Book?

Almost every single call that I ever got from a prospective client began with someone apologizing for the fact that they didn’t have an estate plan yet or that it had been many years since they updated the one that they had. And I always told them the same thing, Don’t apologize! Give yourself credit for making this call and getting the ball rolling. For the 22 years that I practiced trust and estates law, my motto was, Feel good, not guilty! and I stand by it still. And you, reader, are way ahead of most people, just by reading this book.

The truth is that more than half the people in the United States die with no estate plan at all—not even a will. And believe me, I get it. The details of our day-to-day lives can be all consuming—finding a job that supports you and your family, driving kids to and from their activities, searching for a house or an apartment that’s affordable, taking care of elderly parents, and on and on. And I haven’t (if you’ve noticed) even mentioned our more existential issues—politics, climate change, and war. Finding the time to create an estate plan is frankly heroic, given the pace of adult life.

But estate planning is also important—and doesn’t need to be an onerous task. Whether you are young or old, rich or poor, married, single, or living with someone; and whether you have children or not, making an estate plan should be on your agenda. Your plan might be as simple as naming your favorite charity as a beneficiary of your IRA, or as complex as creating a multigenerational trust, or something in between, such as writing a will and leaving all of your assets to your spouse or partner. The specifics don’t matter. What does matter is that you take some time to make a plan before it’s too late.

Estate planning starts with asking yourself some fundamental questions about the people you love, your goals, and your assets. Who do you want to give your money and property to when you die? If you have minor children, who would raise your kids if you couldn’t? What assets do you actually have, anyway? How would you feel if your spouse remarried after your death or your partner got involved in a new relationship? Who should take care of your beloved pet? What nonprofit organizations do you want to support? What kind of legacy do you want to leave behind? What’s the best way to avoid the cost and delay of probate?

You are the best person to answer all of these questions. Putting an estate plan in place now means that you keep control over critical decisions that will need to be made when you die, or if you get sick—especially if one of these things happens unexpectedly.

Unless you’re very wealthy (as in the top 1% of the population), the actual estate planning tasks aren’t that hard. You don’t need to create lots of complicated legal documents to avoid paying taxes or to structure complex trusts for your children. For most people, estate planning is straightforward, and this book explains what you need to know to move forward, whether you choose to do it yourself or work with an attorney.

Why Write This Book, Anyway?

I wrote this book to address the kind of real issues that real people face when they sit down to create an estate plan and that so many estate planning books seem to ignore.

Our Families

Recent studies show that only 1 in 5 U.S. households are nuclear families with two parents raising mutual children. The majority of us live in nontraditional families: same-sex, blended, or headed by single parents. In fact, more than 23 million children live in single-parent families, which is roughly 1 in 3 kids across America.

As of 2021, 25% of 40-year-olds in the United States had never been married. This was a significant increase from 20% in 2010.

Many of us are single and we consider our friends (and pets) to be our chosen family.

Our Homes

Our homes are typically the most valuable asset that we own.

Our homes appreciate, on average, 4% a year—which means if you’ve lived in yours for more than 10 years, you should consider capital gains tax issues when planning.

Property rules vary state by state and are important to understand when planning your estate.

Our (Personal) International Relations

More than 46.2 million Americans were born abroad. Which means that many of us will need to understand international estate planning issues.

More than one-quarter of U.S. children under age 18 live with at least one immigrant parent.

U.S.-owned assets abroad amounted to 31.63 trillion U.S. dollars by the end of 2022.

What Will I Get out of This Book?

This book will help you make the key decisions you’ll need to get your estate plan done and understand basic estate planning concepts and rules so that you plan will be smart and effective, including:

whether you need will or a trust

how to avoid probate and why that’s a good idea

how states define community and separate property and why it matters

how to make an estate plan when you’re in a blended family and want to balance loyalty to your new family with loyalty to children from prior marriages or relationships

how to choose guardians for minor children and make a plan to manage children’s assets

how international issues affect your estate plan, including owning property abroad and being married to a noncitizen spouse

how gift, estate, and income taxes are calculated and how to plan for them

how to structure your trust to minimize capital gains taxes for your children and heirs

how to review and update your retirement plans and life insurance policies to make sure you’re leaving enough money and leaving it to the right people

how to choose the best people to make critical health care and financial decisions for you when you can’t make them yourself, and

what happens if you do nothing.

As an estate planner who has worked with many individuals, couples, and families who grappled with these issues, I’m certain that this book will help you get your estate plan started or updated, whether you’re

a young married couple with a newborn

a middle-aged woman caring for her elderly mother and eyeing retirement

an unmarried couple who want to take care of children from both their current and previous relationships

a single mother with children

a divorced man who wants to leave money to his favorite nephew

an older couple wanting to put their affairs in order, or

anyone who wants to benefit a charity or make sure that their beloved pet is taken care of.

I’ve tried my best to cover the interests of everyone. I’ll give you the benefit of real-life examples that come from clients I had the privilege of working with, my most illuminating war stories, and what I consider best practices, so that you can feel empowered and confident as you put your plan together.

Most lawyers think estate planning is only about creating legal documents. I don’t. This book will help you understand what kind of legal documents you’ll need to make your plan (plus I provide lots of helpful forms to help you get organized to prepare key estate planning documents).

But I hope that this book will also prompt you to think about things that you might not have considered before, such as the best way to leave your house to your children, owning assets in other countries, how you own property during marriage, how divorce affects your retirement and life insurance beneficiary designations, how to make gifts to kids, how to plan for incapacity, and what kind of care you want at the end of your life.

But don’t worry. It’s not as bad as it sounds. Many of my clients found, to their surprise, that they enjoyed the process by the time they were done, and I hope you will, too. It’s rare to sit down and think about life and death issues and the people, organizations, or animals that you love the most. But it can be deeply meaningful, too.

For some reason we all seem to think that death happens to everyone else. My clients often used the phrase If I die, not When. By taking the time to get real for a little while, you might rediscover core values, remember organizations and friends that you want to support, and find unexpected patterns and hidden meaning in the journey your life has taken so far. Don’t take death so personally—lighten up. We’re all in the same boat and facing this can be a relief. I once had a colleague ask me, after she overheard an estate planning meeting in my office, "What are you doing in there? Why are you all laughing? I told her, Oh, you know, talking about death."

You can read this book from beginning to end or skip to the specific chapters that are relevant to you. You can use it as a guidebook for do-it-yourself resources or to make sure that your meetings with an attorney are efficient and productive. However you choose to use it, I hope you find it helpful and illuminating.

Get the Forms Online

Check the Nolo website at:

www.nolo.com/back-of-book/NEP.html

There is a page dedicated to this book where you can download forms used in this book. See the Appendix for details.

CHAPTER

1

What’s in an Estate Plan and Why Do You Need One?

Getting Started

The Key Estate Planning Documents

Will or Trust?

Understanding Probate

How Long Does Probate Take and What Does It Cost?

Property and Assets That Must Go Through Probate

Why Avoid Probate?

How to Avoid Probate

The Workhorses: Wills and Trusts

Wills

Who Should Do a Will

Living Trusts

Who Should Do a Living Trust

Read this chapter if:

You have been procrastinating for years and need to get started on your estate plan.

You want to learn about probate and how to avoid it.

You don’t know whether you should use a will or a living trust to create your estate plan.

If you’ve picked up this book, I’m assuming that you want to get your estate plan started, or update an existing one. If you don’t know quite where to start, just start here. Your will (or trust) is like the center of a wheel. The specific issues that you’ll have to consider as you make your will or trust are like the spokes coming out from that center. This chapter gives you an overview of the territory before you get into the details of navigating your way from start to finish. You might not read this book in order. That’s fine. When you need to, take the time to explore a particular topic in depth, and then come back to Chapter 3 (if you decide to create a will) or Chapter 4 (if you decide to create a trust) and fill in another blank on the worksheets that accompany each chapter. After you’ve worked your way through the entire book, you can use the Fiduciary Worksheet (included in Chapter 12) to capture your choices for all of the people you’ll need to accomplish your plan: trustees, executors, and agents for powers of attorney for health care and finance. And, even if you don’t actually want to make your own will or trust, working through those worksheets (and reading this book) will prepare you to work with an attorney more efficiently.

Getting Started

Estate planning boils down, really, to three things: what you have, who gets what, and how you are going to get those things to those people:

First, you have to identify your assets.

Second, you have to decide who you want to give these assets to.

Third, you have to decide how you want to accomplish the transfer of your assets to your beneficiaries after you die.

This chapter will help you get started with all three of these tasks. But not in this order.

I know it’s important to figure out what you own and how you own it. But, let’s face it, that’s also a chore, and I want you to be motivated, not dispirited. To put it another way, I want you to imagine your destination before you pack your suitcase. I think it makes the most sense to get started with your estate plan this way: First, I’ll give you an overview of how probate works in California so that you can decide the how question—whether it makes the most sense for you to build your plan around a will or a trust. After that, you can work on the what part by preparing an inventory of what you’ve got and creating a list of your key beneficiaries.

For most people, an estate plan consists of three or four main documents: a living trust, a will, a durable power of attorney for finances, and an advance health care directive. Your plan also includes the transfer of your retirement assets and life insurance, which pass to the beneficiaries named on your beneficiary forms for each such account or policy. This book explains why each of these four documents is important, what you’ll need to think about to create each one, and how to name the right people as beneficiaries for your retirement plans and life insurance policies.

But before we get started, let’s consider the word plan. It’s important because the alternative to making a plan, is, of course, not having one at all. People who die with no plan in place will have their property distributed according to California intestacy law (which distributes property according to the closest living family members). The estate will have to go through a probate proceeding if the estate is big enough; and, if the decedent had minor children, those children will be placed with adult guardians after a court investigation and hearing. It might work out just the way you hoped it would—but, really, what are the odds?

California’s intestacy laws leave property belonging to people who die without a will or trust to surviving spouses, children, parents, and siblings—and more distant relatives after that. (In Chapter 3, see What Happens If You Don’t Make a Will, for more on the subject.) But if you aren’t married or don’t want your assets distributed to family members according to the order the law dictates, the only way to make your wishes known and legally binding is to make a will or a trust. If you want to nominate guardians for your minor children, you have to do that in writing, too. There’s just no other way to make it clear to a judge that your partner is the best choice and that your former mother-in-law is not. Given the alternative, it’s hard to justify not putting at least a simple plan in place, isn’t it?

The Key Estate Planning Documents

Wills are the simplest estate planning tools. They are extremely flexible and allow you to appoint executors, guardians, tax savings trusts, and trusts for children. If your estate plan uses a will as its central document, your estate will usually have to go through probate before it can be distributed to your heirs. (Read more about wills and how small estates may avoid probate in Chapter 3, choosing guardians for minors in Chapter 6, and leaving money to minors in Chapter 7.)

Living trusts are legal entities that hold property during a person’s life and include a distribution plan after death. All assets in the living trust avoid probate. Living trusts are coordinated with pour-over wills to appoint guardians (if necessary) and tie up loose ends. (Read more about living trusts in Chapter 4, and about using trusts to plan for blended families in Chapter 8.)

Durable powers of attorney for finances allow someone to make decisions and to manage your financial affairs for assets outside of a living trust if you become incompetent or incapacitated. (Read about durable powers of attorney in Chapter 12.)

Advance health care directives allow you to name an agent to make health care decisions for you if you become unable to do so yourself, and state your wishes for end-of-life care. (Read about advance health care directives in Chapter 12.)

Retirement plans and life insurance policies are distributed to named beneficiaries and pass outside of your will or trust. (Read about naming beneficiaries for retirement plans and life insurance in Chapter 10.)

Will or Trust?

If you’re going to make a plan, your first decision is going to be what kind of plan you need to make—one that uses a will as the central organizing document, or one that uses a living trust to manage your property and distribute it at your death. Think of this choice as a fork in a road. Either kind of estate plan will get you where you want to go. Doing either one is far superior to doing nothing at all.

Both wills and trusts are perfectly effective, legal ways to manage and distribute what you own at death. But they differ in how long it will take to settle your estate and how smooth the road will be between where you are now and that ultimate destination. They also differ in their initial cost to set up and in the time and energy they take to maintain during your lifetime. The biggest difference of all is whether you want to avoid probate—for most people that’s the determining factor in choosing a will or a trust.

Some states, like California, have slow and expensive probate proceedings. In those states, avoiding probate by creating a living trust is an excellent idea. Your heirs will thank you, because a trust avoids the expense and delay that results when an estate settles via a will. Other states, primarily the ones that have adopted a set of laws known as the Uniform Probate Code, have relatively quick and inexpensive probate proceedings, and in those states, a will is a perfectly fine way to make your estate plan.

If you aren’t sure whether your state makes probate easy, you should do a little bit of research to find out. First, check out the Nolo state-specific articles, available for several states, on Nolo.com (on the home page, open the search box and choose articles from the drop down on the left, then search for probate in [state name]). Then, do an internet search for probate in [state name] and evaluate the results. You’re likely to see pages maintained by state legislatures, courts, state bar agencies and associations, and law firms. Read the law firm articles with a grain of salt—they should know the law and be able to faithfully explain it, but keep in mind that they have a vested interest in making the process seem scary and difficult, so that readers hire that firm. As with all internet searches, look for consistent information, which is your best bet that it’s accurate.

You could also ask your friends and family if they’re ever had to go through a probate proceeding—if probate’s a bear in your state, you’ll get an earful.

EXAMPLE: Charlene lived for many years in California. She had a living trust there to hold her home and her investment accounts so that her sons, Alan and Charley, wouldn’t have to endure a probate proceeding when she died. After the boys went to college, she moved to Idaho. There, probate is easy and quick, so she used only a will for her estate plan.

States That Have Adopted the Uniform Probate Code

Understanding Probate

Probate isn’t inherently evil. Actually, it was created with the best of intentions—to make sure that, after people die, their assets get distributed according to their wills and that all of their creditors are paid.

A probate proceeding is a judicial process where a judge supervises the settling of an estate. Although the details of probate vary state by state, the overall process is similar:

The decedent’s will must be filed with the local court.

Someone must be appointed as the legal representative of the estate. This person is called the executor or personal representative—they mean the same thing. This person starts the process by filing a petition asking to be appointed.

If there’s no will, and the estate requires a probate proceeding, someone files a petition with the court asking to be appointed as the legal representative of the estate, the legal representative is called the administrator.

The legal representative must give creditors notice of the death, which is done by publication in a local paper from a list supplied by the probate court.

Once appointed, the personal representative must identify and value all of the decedent’s property subject to the probate proceeding.

The personal representative must make sure that all beneficiaries and heirs receive proper notice of the proceeding.

The personal representative must make sure that all debts and taxes are paid from the estate.

The probate ends with a court order distributing the property as set forth in the will.

If an estate is below a certain threshold, called a small estates threshold, a formal probate proceeding isn’t even necessary. Many states offer a way to transfer property using an affidavit—a simple document that states under penalty of perjury that an asset should be distributed to someone (usually a spouse or an heir). In other states, there’s a simplified probate process that usually involves submitting a simple form to transfer property, not the full-blown probate summarized above.

Small estates can usually be settled outside of court and with minimal costs. The small estates limits vary greatly: In Indiana, estates with a value of $50,000 or less don’t need to go through probate. In California, the threshold is $184,500.

EXAMPLE: When Gary’s mother, Bernice, died at 93, her only asset was a checking account with a balance of $14,000. Her will left everything to Gary. Gary, the executor named in the will, brought a small estates affidavit to the bank, and the bank distributed the money to him. No probate was necessary to transfer the money.

RESOURCE

To learn more about small estate shortcuts, see Nolo’s article Small Estate Probate Shortcuts: Why Even Large Estates May Qualify, which includes links to each state. (On Nolo.com, search for the article by name.) The Executor’s Guide, by Mary Randolph and Jennie Lin (Nolo), is an all-in-one guide for executors. It will help you understand the nuts and bolts of probate, including how to figure out if probate is even necessary where you live.

How Long Does Probate Take and What Does It Cost?

Probate can take as little as two months or more than two years to complete. It’s hard to predict, not only because states vary in the procedures that they use, but because all sorts of things can delay the completion of the process. Creating an accurate inventory of the decedent’s assets can take a long time if the decedent didn’t organize their affairs before they died. If families are in conflict, the process can stretch out for years and cost the estate thousands of dollars in attorney’s fees.

In my experience practicing in California, it always took at least one year (and often two) for an executor to complete the process and receive a court order to distribute the assets. If you own property in more than one state, your estate may have to conduct probate proceedings in each of those states as well. Some states have streamlined and simplified the probate process, but no matter where you live, probate will certainly take at least a few months to complete.

The cost of probate varies widely, too. First, you’ll most likely need to hire an attorney to help you through the process, because the rules of the process are complicated and can be arcane. In some states, like California, lawyers charge a percentage of the value of the probate estate; in other states, lawyers charge an hourly rate. There will be additional costs for court filings, appraisals, publication in a local newspaper, estate organization and cleaning, and notaries. It all adds up. The larger and more complex an estate is, the higher the fees are going to be.

EXAMPLE 1: Joan and her sister inherited a house and a brokerage account from their mother, Grace. Together, the assets were worth $1 million. Grace lived in California, where attorneys charge a percentage of the value of the probate estate. Attorney’s fees for that estate were $23,000.

EXAMPLE 2: If Grace had lived in Minnesota, where attorneys charge on an hourly basis, the cost of the probate would most likely have been a lot less than $23,000. For a simple estate, a range of $3,500–$6,000 would be average.

EXAMPLE 3: If Grace had lived in North Carolina, where attorneys charge on an hourly basis, the cost of the probate would range from $2,000 to $10,000.

Property and Assets That Must Go Through Probate

There’s some good news here. Not all of your assets are subject to probate. Here’s why: Probate exists to prevent fraud after someone dies. The idea is that the court steps in to make sure that the decedent’s wishes, as expressed in the will, are respected and that their assets are identified and distributed to the proper people.

Assets that are held in a trust, have a beneficiary designation, or that pass to a surviving joint tenant are going to go to the right people because the property owner (the decedent) has signed binding legal contracts that already say that the assets go to them. Because we don’t need a court order to make sure that the transfer happens, these assets don’t go through probate.

Assets Outside of Probate

The first thing that I would do at an initial estate planning appointment was to draw a line down the middle of a piece of paper. On one side, I wrote Probate, and on the other side I wrote Not Probate. Most of my clients don’t make that distinction. But it is important for estate planning. As I’ve just explained, judges don’t need to supervise the distribution of the Not Probate side of the diagram. And wills and trusts don’t distribute them. For those assets you’ll need to make sure you’ve designated the right beneficiaries. Your will or trust is what you’ll need to distribute the assets on the Probate side.

The most common examples of assets that won’t be subject to probate include:

Assets in a living trust. The main reason you create a living trust is to avoid probate for your assets on the Probate side of the list. In fact, the reason that I drew that line down the middle of the paper was to help my clients understand why they need a trust for the assets on the Probate side—these are the assets that would cost their heirs time and money to send through probate. (See Chapter 4 for details.)

IRAs, 401(k)s, and similar retirement accounts. These accounts all have beneficiaries you’ve named on record with a plan administrator or an investment manager. Those beneficiaries will receive any money left in those plans when you die; normally, retirement assets are not distributed to your will or trust. (For details, see Chapter 10.)

Life insurance policies. The proceeds from a life insurance policy are often the major source of immediate cash for a surviving spouse or young children. (See Chapter 10 for details.)

Annuities. Annuities are similar to life insurance policies (discussed in Chapter 10). You sign a contract with a company in which you agree to deposit a certain amount of money, and the company agrees to pay that money back to you over a certain period. Sometimes the policies pay a benefit to survivors, and sometimes not.

Payable-on-death bank or transfer-on-death brokerage accounts. You can fill out a form with the company that holds the accounts to make them payable-on-death (POD) accounts, or transfer-on-death (TOD) accounts, which means that they will pass to the person you designated, just like the retirement accounts with designated beneficiaries. (See Chapter 5.)

Real estate with a transfer-on-death deed. In 31 states, people can leave real property to designated beneficiaries by using a transfer-on-death deed, as opposed to establishing a living trust. (See How to Avoid Probate, below for more information on these deeds.)

Property that passes automatically to a surviving owner. Any property you own with someone else and for which someone has a right of survivorship (which would typically be the case of a house you co-own with your spouse) won’t be subject to probate. The right of survivorship means that when one co-owner dies, the survivor owns the property automatically, without probate. So property you own with your spouse (or someone else) as joint tenants or community property with right of survivorship, or tenancy by the entirety, won’t go through probate when the first owner dies. (In Chapter 2, I will discuss all of these forms of property ownership and how to tell if you hold property in one of these ways.)

Assets That Go Through Probate

When you take away any assets that will pass without probate (because you’ve designated a beneficiary or they will pass to a co-owner automatically), whatever’s left must go through probate. For most people, that means assets such as:

cash in the bank

investments, such as stocks or mutual funds

household property, including furniture, furnishings, jewelry, art, your car, your clothes, and anything else that you own, and

real estate that is not held in either joint tenancy or community property with right of survivorship, or that is not subject to a transfer-on-death deed.

EXAMPLE: Violet owns a house and two checking accounts with her husband, Jesse, as a joint tenant. She also inherited a cabin in the mountains from her mother, which she owns as her separate property. Violet wrote a will, leaving the cabin to her niece Stella. At Violet’s death, the cabin must go through probate so it can be transferred to Stella. The home and bank accounts, however, pass to Jesse automatically because he’s the surviving joint tenant.

TIP

Probate has nothing to do with estate tax. When you die, everything that you own, whether it goes through probate or not, is tallied up for federal estate tax purposes. But only the very wealthy are subject to the estate tax. Currently (in 2024), you can leave property worth up to $13.61 million plus an unlimited amount to your spouse (as long as your spouse is a U.S. citizen), without tax. (See Chapter 9 for details on the estate tax.)

Why Avoid Probate?

Most people who live in states that haven’t made probate easy and inexpensive will want to avoid probate for these reasons:

Your heirs gain nothing by probate. The court process and fees could take thousands of dollars out of the estate—money that otherwise would go to your loved ones.

Most families don’t need a court to supervise the distribution of assets, assuming no one is fighting about the estate and they have no messy creditor problems to resolve. Waiting months or a year to distribute the assets to your children, for example, is just a waste of time.

Probate is a public process, so everything you file with the court (including your will) is a public document, open to all who care to inspect them. So, if you want to keep the terms of your estate private, you’d want to create a living trust, which does not need to be filed with the court. (Your heirs and beneficiaries will still be entitled to a copy of the trust when you die, but it won’t be a public record at your local court.) That said, although the trust is not a public record, certain entities will ask to see it (or at least a summary of it, known as a certification of trust). Third parties that owe money to the decedent, or who have a business relationship with the decedent and the estate, such as county assessors, insurance companies, and stock plan administrators, will ask to see a copy of the trust to make sure that they are doing business (like sending checks) with the proper person. In most cases, this will be with the successor trustee.

When Does Probate Make Sense?

Probate court can be a useful place to sort out complicated creditor issues or other weird family dynamics. If your estate is complex and you think having a public forum would help resolve problems, probate might be the right choice for you. If you are worried that people in your family are going to make trouble, having a court order makes decisions final and binding.

How to Avoid Probate

If your probate estate (the value of your assets that must go through probate) is under your state’s small estates threshold, your estate already avoids probate and can be distributed to your heirs without a probate proceeding or a court order. In most states, you will simply need to do the simple affidavit procedure.

If your probate estate exceeds your state’s small estates threshold, then you have some planning to do. Many people create living trusts to avoid probate, which provides the most flexibility and works best if you want to benefit multiple beneficiaries or distribute complicated property. But trusts are not the only way to avoid probate. People with simple estates, who just want to benefit one or two people, can make use of beneficiary account designations, joint tenancy, community property with right of survivorship, tenancy by the entirety, and transfer-on-death deeds to avoid probate and pass their assets to their loved ones simply.

Each of these methods lets you move an asset from the Probate column of my Two Kinds of Assets diagram to the Not Probate column. For example:

You can fill out a form at a bank or an investment company to designate a specific account as a payable-on-death account. At your death, the assets in that account will go directly to the named beneficiaries.

You can record a deed with the county assessor and add a person as a joint tenant, name a transfer-on-death beneficiary, create a tenancy by the entirety, or change a community property deed to a community property with right of survivorship deed. When you die, the surviving joint tenant/owner/beneficiary will own the property and no probate will be necessary. (But taking these steps might raise tax implications, so please don’t do any of these things without consulting an accountant or attorney.)

I love these probate-avoiding techniques, and they have their place in many people’s plans, but they usually aren’t a substitute for an estate plan—beneficiary designations can’t, for example, help your loved ones care for you if you are incapacitated, help manage property for minor beneficiaries, forgive debts or loans you’ve made during life, or transfer assets to another beneficiary if the first one dies before you do.

RESOURCE

If you want to learn more about ways to avoid probate, read 8 Ways to Avoid Probate, by Mary Randolph (Nolo). This book offers practical tips and techniques that you can use to convert bank and investment accounts into payable-on-death or transfer-on-death accounts, own property as joint tenants or use a transfer-on-death deed, and use the small estates affidavit process to avoid probate.

The Workhorses: Wills and Trusts

For your estate plan to address all of the issues it needs to—transferring property, planning to manage property for children, addressing incapacity, and planning to minimize taxes—you need more than just a beneficiary designation or a survivorship deed.

Wills and trusts are the documents that you need to make your plan comprehensive. They can be simple or complicated; that’s up to you. But no estate plan is really a plan for