Estate Planning

Your accounts don't automatically follow your estate plan while you're still alive but unable to manage them — that depends on whether you have a financial power of attorney in place and whether your accounts actually honor it. We check that alongside your attorney rather than assume it's covered.

A trust or beneficiary designation only avoids probate if the account is actually titled or designated correctly — plenty of plans miss this step. We review your account titling directly instead of taking the plan's intent at face value.

Being named in a document and being able to act on your accounts are two different things — a healthcare directive, for example, doesn't give someone authority over a brokerage account. We help confirm the right person can actually step in where it matters.

Options range from staggered distributions to a trust that releases funds on a schedule or under specific conditions, coordinated with your attorney. Which one fits depends on the beneficiary, the amount, and what you're trying to protect them from.

Beneficiary designations on retirement accounts and life insurance override what's written in your will, so a mismatch between the two is one of the most common ways an estate plan doesn't play out as intended. We check this directly against your account statements, not just your documents.