How Long Does It Take To Create An Estate Plan?
An estate plan can be created pretty quickly if a person is in a situation where they need one pretty right away. I have created an estate plan in less than a week when I had a client come in and say, “I’m going on the operating table, and I don’t think I am going to be coming out of this. This is what I have and this is what I need.” If they know exactly what they want, then we can essentially work overtime in order to create an estate plan for them. However, that’s not the norm; truly the norm is that a couple comes in or an individual comes in and knows what their general estate is comprised of and what they want to accomplish, but they don’t have all of their decisions made, and they are not feeling any particular rush to make those decisions on the spot.
They are going to learn a lot from the initial interview that I have with them in terms of what questions and answers they should be looking to provide in order to provide the solution that is going to meet those goals. A lot of times we come up with solutions that people didn’t even think about. They tell me what the problem is and that they have no idea how they are going to solve it, and once I tell them how to solve the problem, they have an a-ha moment, which opens an entire new way of thinking for them.
The normal course of an estate plan is not significantly elaborate and usually lasts six to eight weeks. We usually spend the first couple of weeks talking about everything. There are lots of questions and answers, and we collect a lot of data. We craft an overall estate plan structure for them, sit down and talk about it, and then make a determination as to whether or not it’s going to affect their needs. They ask a lot of questions get answers. Once they’ve locked that in, we will still need to gather more information and draft the documents. The period of time between gathering the information and drafting the documents lasts a few more weeks, and then we set a time for the signing of the estate plan.
Usually, we want to get together the various different players who are part of the estate plan, which is the principal or the grantor who is creating the estate plan, plus the various different people who might be Trustees, health care proxies, or powers of attorney agents. If we can, we pull them all together into a single room so that we can describe the estate pan that the individual or the parents want. We answer everyone’s questions together because in this way everyone is on the same page. I always provide documents which provide guidelines for how people are going to operate afterward. When they take notes, if they didn’t remember or didn’t understand everything that was said, there are the guidance documents I provide which they can refer back to. Of course, there are people who are calling with questions and I take questions all the time to help people to fine-tune whatever it is that they are doing and formulate a proper strategy for how they are going to handle their particular roles in the estate plan. We create them all together and by that time, from start to finish, it’s usually one and a half to two months after we started. That’s the normal avenue; of course, if there are more complicated situations and we don’t have very heavy time crunches, then they can take a little bit longer.
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