Getting your Affairs in Order vs Estate Planning – have you done what you need to do?

My new favorite book is Get Your Ducks In a Row: the Baby Boomers Guide to Estate Planning by Harry S. Margolis. He’s a Massachusetts Elder Law Attorney, and he wrote a readable book full of case studies and anecdotes. It makes the material come alive.

You know how everyone knows you’re supposed to have a colonoscopy when you turn 50? When did that start? It wasn’t a thing when I was a kid, but somewhere along the way it just became a rule that everyone knows.

I want a new rule that says “Everyone must review their estate plan before November 2 each year,” i.e., have your affairs in order before All Soul’s Day or the Mexican Days of the Dead.

So this season I’m doing a big lift in my practice, trying to shepherd all my clients through a round of getting your affairs in order. Right now I’m planning to put together a bunch of binders for my clients with the stuff they need, and I’ve been reading a bunch of books on getting your affairs in order. Many are overwhelmingly unlikely to ever be completed, or possibly even started. I’m thinking here of Elmo Petterle’s Getting Your Affairs In Order: Make Life Easier for Those You Leave Behind. It’s a lovely book and what I’d offer to an ambitious engineer at age 70 to do as a hobby, but it’s simply TOO MUCH. (I bought my copy used and there are pencil marks on two pages.) I have similar issues with the AARP-branded A Checklist for my Family: A Guide to My History, Financial Plans, and Final Wishes by Sally Balch Hurme. It’s *good, but it’s over 200 pages, and I can’t help wonder if it won’t get tossed during a move. The beautifully bound I’m Dead. Now What?: Important Information About My Belongings, Business Affairs, and Wishes by Peter Pauper Press would be less likely to be tossed (the trollish title gets attention, as does the binding, but it’s 96 pages of heavy paper with tabs like Last Words that would be hard to definitively lay down in vellum.

On the other end of the spectrum, I really like the little booklet offered by www.FiveWishes.org. I buy them in bulk and hand them out to all my clients. Including front and back covers, it’s 12 pages long with large fonts and lots of white space. It’s a really great starting place, and often it’s enough, especially since I have the rest of the data their heirs would need.

To that end, I want a binder and a Google doc that we update from time to time. I’m still searching for a planning binder I love, and I’m about to just go create my own. It’s back-to-school time, I think I can get a deal on binders and tabs.

I think when people say “estate planning” they’re thinking about getting will and trusts done. I actually am thinking more about “getting your affairs in order,” so there are separate tabs for info about your pets, continuity planning for your business, what you want your obituary to say, who to contact first, second, third… and, of course, one of the tabs will be for the traditional estate planning docs.

Financial planners are expected and required to shepherd our clients through estate planning, even though you need estate planning lawyers to create a will and plan that gets the law right. I agree and recognize the distinction. But it’s hard, sometimes, to find that line between being a good financial planner and not practicing law. (I’ve had ONE graduate-level course in estate planning, not an entire degree.) That said I’ve read widely on this topic over the years from various directions, and I keep pulling together resources to help my clients through this process.

My new favorite book is Get Your Ducks In a Row: the Baby Boomers Guide to Estate Planning by Harry S. Margolis. He’s a Massachusetts Elder Law Attorney, and he wrote a readable book full of case studies and anecdotes. It makes the material come alive. I thought I knew all this stuff, but he taught me a few things. He made sure to mention the vagaries of Massachusetts as he went along, which I appreciated because Massachusetts has really, really absurd estate planning wrinkles that never come up when I read a more nationally focused treatise. (If you live in a community property state, you’d want to read one more focused on those issues, and if you have more than $12M in net worth, he is very clear that he isn’t talking to you right now, but you should, ahem, make an appointment.)

“I want a new rule that says “Everyone must review their estate plan before November 2 each year,” i.e., have your affairs in order before All Soul’s Day or the Mexican Days of the Dead.”