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Since you’ll be discussing topics like death, incapacity, and other frightening life events, hiring an estate planning lawyer may feel intimidating or morbid. But it definitely doesn’t have to be that way.

Instead, it can be the most empowering decision you ever make for yourself and your loved ones. The key to transforming the experience of hiring a lawyer from one that you dread into one that empowers you is to educate yourself first. This is the person who is going to be there for your family when you can’t be, so you want to really understand who the lawyer is as a human, not just an attorney. Of course, you’ll also want to find out the kind of services your potential lawyer offers and how they run their business.

To this end, here are five questions to ask to ensure you don’t end up paying for legal services that you don’t need, expect, or want. Once you know exactly what you should be looking for when choosing a planning professional, you’ll be much better positioned to hire an attorney who will provide the kind of love, attention, care, and trust your family deserves.

There’s no reason you should be afraid to ask a lawyer how he or she bills for the work they do on your behalf. In fact, questions about billing and payment should be among the very first subjects you bring up when you first contact them. No one wants surprises, especially when it comes to the bill.

If you call a lawyer’s office and they are reluctant or refuse to give you clear answers to questions about how they charge for their services, determine your fees, or what they expect certain services will cost, this is a big red flag. When someone is hesitant to discuss their billing or business practices, you could be in for some major surprises about what things cost down the road.

Find an estate planning lawyer who bills for all of their services on a flat-fee, no surprises, basis—and never on an hourly basis—unless it’s required by the court for limited purposes. And ideally, you want a lawyer who will guide you through a process of discovery in which they learn about your family dynamics, your assets, and they educate you about what would happen for your family and to your assets if and when something happens to you, and then support you in choosing the right plan for you that meets your budget and your desired outcomes.

Our process for your planning begins with a Family Wealth Planning Session™, in which we educate you about the law and you educate us about your family dynamics and assets, and then you choose the right plan, at the right cost, for the people you love.

One of the biggest complaints people have about working with lawyers is that they are notoriously unresponsive. Indeed, I’ve heard of cases in which clients went weeks without getting a call back from their lawyer. This is all too common, but totally unacceptable, especially when you’re paying them big bucks.

That said, in most cases, these lawyers aren’t blowing you off—they simply don’t have enough support or the systems in place to be able to be responsive. Far too many lawyers believe they can take care of everything themselves. From paperwork and client meetings to scheduling and returning phone calls to connecting their clients with other advisors, there are just too many responsibilities for one person to manage all on their own.

The truth is, if a lawyer is a complete solo practitioner without support or works for a firm that doesn’t provide adequate support, sooner or later, they are almost certain to become overwhelmed and unresponsive. Given this, it’s vital that you ask your lawyer about how they will respond to your needs if you decide to become their client.

Ask them how quickly calls are typically returned in their office, ask them if there will be someone on-hand to answer quick questions, and ask them how they will support you to keep your plan up to date on an ongoing basis and be there for your loved one’s when you can’t be.

A great way to test this is to call your prospective lawyer’s office and ask for him or her. If you get put through right away—or even worse, your call gets sent to a full voicemail—think twice about hiring this lawyer. This means they don’t have effective systems in place for managing and responding to calls or answering quick questions.

Instead, what you want is for the person who answers the phone—or another team member—to offer to help you. And if that individual cannot help you, then he or she should schedule a call for you to talk with your lawyer at a future date and time.

Your lawyer simply can’t be effective or efficient if he or she is taking every call that comes through. Ideally, all calls to your lawyer should be pre-scheduled with a clear agenda, so you both can be ready to focus on your specific needs.

Next week in part two we’ll talk more about the ways in which your attorney should communicate with you and list the remaining three questions to ask before hiring your estate planning lawyer.

Proper estate planning can keep your family out of conflict, out of court, and out of the public eye. If you’re ready to create a comprehensive estate plan, contact us to schedule your Family Wealth Planning Session. Even if you already have a plan in place, we will review it and help you bring it up to date to avoid heartache for your family. Schedule online today.

If you are like many homeowners, your home is likely your family’s most valuable and treasured asset. In light of this, you want to plan wisely to ensure your home will pass to your heirs in the most efficient and safe manner possible when you die or in the event you become incapacitated by illness or injury.

Indeed, proper estate planning is as much a part of responsible homeownership as having homeowners insurance or keeping your home’s roof well maintained. When it comes to including your home in your estate plan, you have a variety of different planning vehicles to choose from, but for a variety of different reasons, putting your home in a trust is often the smartest choice.

In part one, we explained how revocable living trusts and irrevocable trusts work, and we discussed the process of transferring the legal title of your home into a trust to ensure it’s properly funded. Here in part two, we will outline the key advantages of using a trust to pass your home to your loved ones compared to other estate planning strategies.

While both wills and trusts are the most commonly used estate planning vehicles to pass on wealth and other assets to your loved ones, putting your home in a trust has a number of distinct benefits compared to using a will.

One of the primary advantages of using a trust to pass on your home to your heirs is the avoidance of the court process. Unlike a will, assets held in trust do not have to go through. The court oversees the will’s administration, ensuring your assets are distributed according to your wishes, with automatic supervision to handle any disputes.

However, can be a long and expensive process, which can be emotionally draining for your loved ones. Depending on the complexity of your estate, proceedings can drag out for months or even years, and your family will likely have to hire an attorney to represent them, which can result in costly legal fees that can drain your estate. Plus, is open to the public, which can make things risky for those you leave behind, especially if the wrong people take an interest in your family’s affairs.

Unlike a will, if your trust is properly set up and maintained, your family won’t have to go through to inherit your home. Instead, your home will immediately pass to your loved ones upon your death, without the need for any court intervention. Avoiding the delay of can be especially critical when it comes to a home to ensure the property is properly maintained, since the home may fall into disrepair while is being completed.

Finally, unlike wills, trusts remain private and are not part of the public record. So, with a properly funded trust, the entire process of transferring ownership of your home can happen in the privacy of your Personal Family Lawyer®’s office, not a courtroom, and on your family’s time.

In addition to passing on your home to your loved ones when you die, putting your home in a trust can also protect your home in the event you become incapacitated by serious illness or injury. In contrast, a will only goes into effect upon your death, so it would be useless for protecting your home in the event you become incapacitated.

If you do become incapacitated with only a will in place, your family will have to petition the court to appoint a conservator or guardian to manage your affairs related to homeownership, including paying your mortgage and property taxes, keeping up with your home’s general maintenance, and overseeing the sale of your home. The process of petitioning the court to appoint a conservator or guardian can be costly, time-consuming, and stressful.

And there’s always the possibility that the court could appoint a family member as a guardian that you’d never want to manage your family home. Or the court might select a professional guardian, putting a total stranger in control of your family’s most precious asset and leaving it vulnerable to crooked guardians, who could potentially sell your home for their personal financial gain.

With a trust, however, you can include provisions in the terms of the trust that appoint someone of your choosing—not the court’s—as successor trustee to manage your home’s ownership and/or sale if you’re unable to do so yourself due to incapacity. For example, your trust could authorize your successor trustee to sell your home in order to pay for the costs of long-term care should you require it.

Because you can include specific instructions in a trust’s terms for how and when the assets held by the trust are distributed to a beneficiary, a trust can offer greater control over how your assets are distributed compared to a will. For example, you could stipulate in the trust’s terms that the assets can only be distributed upon certain life events, such as the completion of college or marriage, or when the beneficiary reaches a certain age.

In this way, you can help prevent your beneficiaries from blowing through their inheritance all at once, and offer incentives for them to demonstrate responsible behavior. And as we mentioned earlier, as long as the assets are held in trust, they’re protected from the beneficiaries’ creditors, lawsuits, and divorce, which is something else wills don’t provide.

If you leave your home to your loved ones using a will and you designate more than one person to inherit the property, there’s a potential for conflict because each individual gets an undivided interest in the home. Given this, these individuals must agree on what to do with the home—keep it or sell it—and they may not see eye-to-eye, which can create unnecessary drama that can tear your family apart.

For example, if one of your children wants to keep the home and live in it, but the other prefers to sell it in order to pay off their debts, the child who wants to sell could go to court in order to force their sibling to sell the property. However, this potential for conflict can be avoided by putting your home in a living trust.

If you name more than one beneficiary for your home in your living trust, you can name a neutral third-party as successor trustee to decide what happens to the home, and then manage the distribution after a clear determination is made. For example, the trustee could allow one child to live in the home, while the other could receive other estate assets of equal value, or the trustee could come up with some alternative solution to stave off the potential for conflict.

In some states you can use what’s known as a Transfer On Death (TOD) deed in order to transfer ownership of your home to your heirs. Initially created as an inexpensive alternative to living trusts, a TOD deed allows named beneficiaries to assume ownership of your home without undergoing or trust administration.

However, TOD deeds come with some major drawbacks, and they may end up creating unintended problems for your loved ones. To this end, before you rely on a TOD deed as a cheaper alternative to passing your house via a trust, consider the following factors:

• If your property is held joint tenancy, your joint tenant becomes the sole owner upon your death and has full control of the property, and your TOD deed would be inapplicable.
• Unlike with a living trust, a TOD deed cannot be used to manage, sell, or borrow against the property during your incapacity. This means that if you become incapacitated, the beneficiary of your TOD deed would be unable to access your home in order to sell or refinance the property to pay for your care, as your trustee could if you had the property in a living trust.
• If the beneficiary of the TOD deed is a minor upon your death, a court-appointed guardian will need to be named to control your property until the child reaches legal age. With a living trust, however, the person you named as successor trustee can manage the property until your child reaches legal age.
• Using a TOD deed in order to transfer ownership of your home to try and lower the value of your assets doesn’t count as a Medicaid spend-down, so it will not help you qualify for the program. Plus, depending on the state, the property may even be subject to the Medicaid Estate Recovery Program (MERP) after you die. As mentioned earlier, if you want to qualify for Medicaid and protect your home from MERP, meet with your Personal Family Lawyer® to discuss creating an irrevocable trust.

Given these potential complications, using a TOD deed to transfer ownership of your home as an alternative to a living trust is almost never a good idea. Instead, your Personal Family Lawyer®, can help you find better ways to transfer ownership of your home that will keep your family out of court and out of conflict.

Although putting your home in a living trust can be an ideal way to pass your home to your loved ones, each family’s circumstances are different. This is why your Personal Family Lawyer® will not create any documents until we know what you actually need, and what will be the most affordable solution for you and your family—both now and in the future—based on your family dynamics, assets, and desires.

The best way for you to determine whether or not your estate plan should include a will, a trust, or some combination of the two is to meet with your Personal Family Lawyer® for a Family Wealth Planning Session, which is the first step in our Life & Legacy Planning Process. During this process, we’ll take you through an analysis of your assets, what’s most important to you, and what will happen to your loved ones when you die or if you become incapacitated.

Sitting down with a Personal Family Lawyer® will empower you to feel 100% confident that you have the right combination of estate planning solutions to fit with your unique asset profile, family dynamics, and budget. In fact, we see estate planning as so much more than planning for death, which is why we call it Life & Legacy Planning—it’s about your life and the legacy you are creating by the choices you make today. Contact us today to learn more.

Proper estate planning can keep your family out of conflict, out of court, and out of the public eye. If you’re ready to create a comprehensive estate plan, contact us to schedule your Family Wealth Planning Session. Even if you already have a plan in place, we will review it and help you bring it up to date to avoid heartache for your family. Schedule online today.

While Facebook has recently developed user-friendly options for managing your personal profile in the event of your death, the company has yet to develop any streamlined way to handle your business accounts once you’re gone. Indeed, a Google search of “what happens to my Facebook account when I die” turns up tons of hits related to personal profiles, but hardly any covering business pages.

Facebook currently allows your personal profile to be deleted, memorialized, or you can appoint a “legacy contact” to manage the account upon your death. But Facebook is hardly limited to personal profiles—indeed, practically every company now has a Facebook business page.

Facebook business pages not only serve as a powerful PR and marketing vehicle, but they also allow companies to generate revenue through advertising and online storefronts. Seeing that these pages have far more tangible value compared to personal profiles, it’s puzzling why the company has yet to to develop similar options for managing them in the event of the account owner’s death.

But given that roughly 8,000 Facebook users die every day, it’s clear these pages are being dealt with in some way, so we did some research to see what we could find. After combing through Facebook’s Help pages and community forums, along with various other websites, we’ve come up with a few ways your Facebook business page can be handled in the event of your death.

Until Facebook develops a simpler process for dealing with your business account, you have three basic options:

If you have no interest in your company continuing after you’re gone, you can have its business page deleted. However, this process is not the same as it is for your personal profile.

Unlike personal profiles, Facebook business pages allow you to name administrators, called admins, who have complete power to manage the page, including shutting it down. Given this, the easiest way to have your business page deleted would be to name another person as admin before your death, and instruct them to permanently delete your business page when you’re gone.

Or you could forego naming an admin and simply instruct a trusted friend or family member to use your admin login information to delete your business page once you pass away. Of course, this means you’ll have to leave that person your business page login info and ensure they know how to find it in your absence.

If you have no admins in place other than yourself when you die, your business page can still be removed. However, because there’s no official way for you to personally request the page to be shut down upon your death—as there is with personal profiles—you’ll need to delegate that job to someone else. And it will have to be handled in conjunction with your personal profile.

Although the company used to allow users to create stand-alone business pages, Facebook now requires you to set up a personal profile before you can create a business page. In light of this, Facebook will not take any action on your business page until your death is confirmed and your personal profile has been modified to reflect this fact.

So you’ll first want to decide how your personal profile will be handled upon your death. As mentioned earlier, you can have your profile deleted, memorialized, or you can name a legacy contact to manage the account.

At this point, the most efficient way to delete your business page in this manner would be to name a legacy contact, who can first delete or memorialize your personal profile. Once that’s done, the contact can then request your Facebook business page be deleted as well.

Seeing that many companies continue operating after the original owner’s death, you may want to keep your Facebook business page up and running—at least until the company is sold or a new owner takes over. As with deleting your page, the way to go about doing this will depend on how your account is managed at the time of your death.

If you’ve named one or more admins, they can simply continue managing the page. Or they can allow a new admin to sign up and have them take over.

If you haven’t named an admin other than yourself and your family or executor has no access to the page’s login info, the process of managing the page will be much the same as deleting your page without an admin.

First, your personal profile will have to be deleted or memorialized, and from there, your legacy contact or another trusted individual should be able to make themselves admin and manage the page. This is because when the only admin of a page or group dies and Facebook learns of it, your admin status will be removed, and a notification that a new admin is needed will appear on the page’s timeline.

However, once Facebook learns of your death, it can take up to 3-4 weeks for your own admin status to be removed, allowing someone else to sign up. So until that happens, no one will be able to update the page.

Whether you plan to have your business sold once you’re gone or hand the reins to an heir, you should not only include its physical assets and equipment in your estate plan, but its digital assets as well. And spelling out how the company’s Facebook business page should be managed after you’re gone is just the tip of the iceberg.

From company websites and online stores to cloud storage accounts and financial assets like cryptocurrency and PayPal accounts, there’s a ton of online property to plan for. And with only a few laws currently on the books governing estate planning for digital assets, it’s important that you have trusted counsel to advise you on the latest options available.

We can help you inventory all of your company’s digital assets and put in place the optimal estate planning strategies to ensure they are preserved and passed on exactly the way you want, no matter what.

We offer a complete spectrum of legal services for business owners and can help you make the wisest choices on how to deal with your business throughout life and in the event of your death. We also offer you a LIFT Your Life And Business Planning Session, which includes a review of all the legal, insurance, financial, and tax systems you need for your business. Schedule online today.

Nearly three years have passed since Aretha Franklin, known as the “Queen of Soul,” died from pancreatic cancer at age 76. When she first passed away in August 2018, her family thought that Aretha died without any estate plan at all.

But since then, four different wills attributed to the late singer have been discovered. And ever since those documents came to light, her four adult sons—Clarence, Edward, Ted White Jr., and Kecalf—have been in court fighting one another over her assets, as well as who among them should be designated as the estate’s representative.

While a trial is set for August 2021 to establish whether any of the four documents, some of which are handwritten and barely legible, can formally stand as her will, Aretha’s story demonstrates just how destructive shoddy estate planning can be for the loved ones we leave behind.

Indeed, in part one of this series, we discussed how the ongoing court battle between Aretha’s four sons has created an ugly rift between the siblings and exposed dark family secrets to the tabloids, both of which the notoriously private singer undoubtedly would have wanted to avoid. We also noted that following Aretha’s death, the IRS claimed that she owed nearly $8 million in unpaid income taxes. And because Aretha’s sons only recently reached a tentative deal to pay off the IRS, so far, Aretha’s family has yet to receive a single penny from her estate—which is estimated to be worth up to $80 million—even though the legendary musician died nearly three years ago.

Here in part two, we will discuss how Aretha could have planned to spare her loved ones from their current conflict, expense, and embarrassing public exposure. From there, we will discuss how you can take steps to ensure that your family can avoid suffering a similar fate as Aretha’s, even if you have far less wealth and assets than Aretha.

The IRS Comes Calling

Given that none of Aretha’s four alleged wills were properly completed or filed with the court, her estate and all its assets remain stuck in court, awaiting a judge to rule on the validity of those documents. However, even if one of those wills was proven valid, her assets would still be inaccessible to her loved ones due to her massive tax debt.

When Aretha died in 2018, the IRS claimed the late singer owed more than $7.8 million in unpaid income taxes, interest, and penalties, which accrued from 2010 to 2017, according to the Detroit Free Press. While her sons have appealed the total amount owed, the estate has been steadily paying on the tax debt and interest since Aretha’s death, and as of December 2020, the remaining unpaid balance with the IRS was estimated to be $4.75 million.

In March 2021, a tentative deal was reached with the IRS to pay off the debt, as well as finally distribute some cash to her four sons. Under the agreement, which was reached with attorneys for Aretha’s sons, the IRS will receive an immediate payment of $800,000. Additionally, 45% of quarterly revenue from the estate, which comes largely from royalties and licensing, will be paid toward the balance due to the IRS. Another 40% is to be held in an escrow account to pay future taxes on income generated by the estate.

The deal also stipulates that Aretha’s four sons will receive an immediate payment of just $50,000 each. From there, they are set to get quarterly payouts in equally distributed shares of whatever is left after the remaining 15% of revenue is used to cover the estate’s administration costs, which could eat up a substantial part of the remaining funds.

Although the deal must still be approved by a judge, and Aretha’s sons continue to dispute the total amount of taxes owed, the agreement stipulates that any overpayments to the IRS will be returned to the estate for equal distribution to the sons should they be successful in proving a lower amount is due, whether in trial or through a settlement outside of court.

The Dangers of DIY Planning

Aretha made an obvious mistake by attempting to create her first three wills on her own by hand, with apparently no help from legal counsel, and the fact that those wills were lost for years attests to just how risky do-it-yourself (DIY) planning can be. Indeed, when you rely on DIY estate planning instead of the services of a trusted advisor guiding you and your family, your planning documents can easily disappear or even be stolen and changed by someone else.

When we create or update your plan, it is standard practice for us to not only keep current copies of your documents in a file at our office, but we also ensure that everyone named in your plan knows what their role is and what to do when something happens to you. This way, the people you choose can immediately put the necessary legal actions in motion to effectively manage your estate.

While it is always a good idea to have a lawyer help you create your planning documents, this is particularly true when you have a blended family like Aretha’s. If you are in a second (or more) marriage, with children from a prior marriage, there is an inherent risk of dispute because your children and spouse often have conflicting interests, particularly if there is significant wealth at stake.

And the risk of conflict is vastly increased if you are looking to disinherit a beneficiary, like Aretha may have attempted to do in one of her wills. By creating your own plan, even with the help of an online document service, like LegalZoom, Rocket Lawyer, or TrustandWill.com, you will not be able to consider and plan ahead to avoid all the potential legal and family conflicts that could arise.

As your Personal Family Lawyer®, our processes and systems are designed to identify and prevent conflicts before they ever happen, and our unique planning process can help create connections among your loved ones and bring your family closer together. In fact, this is part of our special sauce!

Relying on a Will Alone is Not Enough

Next up in the list of Aretha’s planning failures is her fourth will, which was reportedly created with help of the Detroit law firm Dickinson Wright, according to the Detroit Free Press. Although the fact that Aretha hired a law firm to help her draft the will shows that the singer was apparently getting more serious about planning, her efforts there still failed.

First off, because her estate plan includes only a will and not a trust to hold title to her assets privately, Aretha’s family had a guarantee of getting stuck in the court process known as probate. And as we have already seen in Aretha’s case, probate can not only be a long, drawn-out process that takes years to complete, but it can also create ugly conflicts between family members and waste significant money on lawyer’s fees.

Worst of all, relying on a will alone has the potential to have disastrous repercussions for one of Aretha’s family members in particular—her oldest son, Clarence, who has special needs. While Aretha’s fourth will reportedly contained instructions to create a trust for Clarence, it is unclear exactly what kind of a trust this would be, and regardless of the type, it appears that no trust was ever set up.

Planning For Those With Special Needs

When planning for a loved one with special needs, you must be extremely careful and always work with an experienced lawyer like us, because if handled improperly, you can easily disqualify your loved one with special needs from much-needed government benefits. Because individuals with special needs often require a lifetime of healthcare and other forms of support, most of these individuals rely on government programs to offset the exorbitant costs of such care.

However, these programs have strict income limits, so if you leave money directly to a person with special needs, such as through a will as Aretha seemed to do, you risk disqualifying him or her for those benefits. Aretha could have set up a planning vehicle known as a Special Needs Trust for her son Clarence. By creating a Special Needs Trust, Aretha would be able to provide supplemental financial resources for Clarence for the rest of his life, without affecting his eligibility for public healthcare and income assistance benefits like Medicaid and Social Security.

That said, the rules for Special Needs Trusts are complicated and can vary greatly between different states, so if you have a loved one with special needs like Clarence, be sure to work with us as your Personal Family Lawyer®. We can make certain that upon your death, your loved one with special needs would have the financial means they need to live a full life, without jeopardizing their access to government benefits.

One final benefit a Special Needs Trust would have had for Clarence is the fact that such a trust—like all trusts—would not be required to go through probate, so Clarence would have had immediate access to his inheritance. And though Clarence’s three brothers do not require a Special Needs Trust, they too would have been far better off had Aretha used a trust instead of just a will to leave them their inheritance.

Lifetime Asset Protection Trusts: Airtight Protection for Your Children’s Inheritance

While there are several types of trusts available, given the size of Aretha’s fortune and the complexity of her assets—which include the rights to her vast catalog of music, as well as royalties from her recordings and licensing rights to her name and image—we would have advised the Queen of Soul to create a Lifetime Asset Protection Trust to pass her assets to her three youngest sons, Edward, Ted White Jr., and Kecalf.

Using a Lifetime Asset Protection Trust, Aretha could have not only immediately transferred her assets to her sons upon her death or incapacity, without the need for court intervention, but she could have also ensured that those assets would transfer with protection from common life events like divorce, serious illness, lawsuits, and even bankruptcy. At the same time, the trust would give her sons the ability to access, manage, and invest those assets, while retaining airtight asset protection for their entire lives.

Guidance and Direction For Your Children’s Inheritance—And Your Legacy

Had Aretha used a trust, she could have provided guidelines to the Trustee, providing him or her with clear directions about how her assets could be used for her beneficiaries’ benefit, or even built-in provisions to let her heirs control their own inheritance while maintaining their asset protection benefits. By providing a Trustee with guidelines for distributions, you can be sure that the person you name to handle your affairs is aware of your wishes and values when making distributions, rather than simply guessing about what you would have wanted, which often leads to problems.

Given that Aretha’s estate includes the rights to her music, name, and likeness, all of which can provide a potentially indefinite source of income for her loved ones, it is almost certain that Aretha would have wanted a say in how this priceless intellectual property should be managed in the future. A Lifetime Asset Protection Trust would give Aretha the ability to govern how these treasured assets should—and should not be—used by her heirs, ensuring that her artistic legacy is always honored, and her family can benefit from her incredible talent for generations to come.

Although a Lifetime Asset Protection Trust would have been an ideal way for the Queen of Soul to protect and pass on her assets, such trusts are not for everyone. But contrary to what you might think, Lifetime Asset Protection Trusts are not just for the rich and famous.

These protective trusts can be even more useful if you are leaving a relatively modest inheritance, since the smaller the inheritance, the more at risk it is of getting wiped out by a single unfortunate event like a medical emergency or lawsuit. That said, if your kids are going to spend most of their inheritance on everyday expenses and consumables, such trusts probably do not make much sense.

Meet with us, as your Personal Family Lawyer®, to see if a Lifetime Asset Protection Trust is the right choice for your family.

Learn from Aretha’s Mistakes

Regardless of your financial status, planning for your potential incapacity and eventual death is something that you should take care of immediately, especially if you have children. While Aretha lived a relatively long life, you never know when tragedy may strike, and through diligent estate planning, you can save your family from the needless disputes, expense, and embarrassing public exposure the late singer’s loved ones are currently enduring.

As Aretha Franklin’s story demonstrates, do-it-yourself planning can have terrible consequences for your family—and in the worst cases, it can be even worse than if you had no estate plan at all. We urge you to use the Queen of Soul’s story as a learning experience—when done properly, estate planning can keep your family out of court, out of conflict, and out of the public eye. Even more, truly effective planning can ensure your wealth, assets, and legacy are protected and used to benefit your children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren in strict accordance with your values.

To ensure your estate plan works exactly as intended, meet with your Personal Family Lawyer® to review and update your current plan or create one if you have yet to do so. Contact us today to schedule your appointment.

Proper estate planning can keep your family out of conflict, out of court, and out of the public eye. If you’re ready to create a comprehensive estate plan, contact us to schedule your Family Wealth Planning Session. Even if you already have a plan in place, we will review it and help you bring it up to date to avoid heartache for your family. Schedule online today.

Unlike many estate assets, if you’re looking to collect the proceeds of a life insurance policy, the process is fairly simple provided you’re named as the beneficiary. That said, following a loved one’s death, the whole world can feel like it’s falling apart, and it’s helpful to know exactly what steps need to be taken to access the insurance funds as quickly and easily as possible during this trying time.

And if you’ve been dependent on the deceased for regular financial support and/or are responsible for paying funeral expenses, the need to access insurance proceeds can sometimes be downright urgent.

Here, we’ve outlined the typical procedure for claiming and collecting life insurance proceeds, along with discussing how beneficiaries can deal with common hiccups in the process. However, because all life insurance policies are different and some involve more complexities than others, it’s always a good idea to consult with a Personal Family Lawyer® if you need extra help or guidance.

To start the life insurance claims process, you first need to identify who the beneficiary of the life insurance policy is—are you the beneficiary, or is a trust set up to handle the claim for you?

We often recommend that life insurance proceeds be paid to a trust, not outright to a beneficiary. This way, the life insurance proceeds can be used by the beneficiary, but the funds are protected from lawsuits and/or creditors that the beneficiary may be involved with—even a future divorce.

In the event that a trust is the beneficiary, contact us so that we can create a certificate of trust that you (or the trustee, if the trustee is someone other than you) can send to the life insurance company, along with a death certificate when one is available.

In any case, you (or the trustee) will notify the insurance company of the policyholder’s death, either by contacting a local agent or by following the instructions on the company’s website. If the policy was provided through an employer, you may need to contact their workplace first, and someone there will put you in touch with the appropriate representative.

Many insurance companies allow you to report the death over the phone or by sending in a simple form and not require the actual death certificate at this stage. Depending on the cause of death, it can sometimes take weeks for the death certificate to be available, so this simplified reporting speeds up the process.

From there, the insurance company typically sends the beneficiary (or the trustee of the trust named as beneficiary) more in-depth forms to fill out, along with further instructions about how to proceed. Some of the information you’re likely to be asked to provide during the claims process include the deceased’s date of birth, date and place of death, their Social Security number, marital status, address, as well as other personal data.

Your state’s vital records office creates the death certificate, and it will either send the certificate directly to you or route it through your funeral/mortuary provider. Once you’ve received a certified copy of the death certificate, you’ll send it to the insurance company, along with the other completed forms requested.

If more than one adult beneficiary was named, each person should provide his or her own signed and notarized claim form. If any of the primary beneficiaries died before the policyholder, an alternate/contingent beneficiary can claim the proceeds, but he or she will need to send in the death certificates of both the policyholder and the primary beneficiary.

While policyholders are free to name anyone as a beneficiary, when minor children are named, it creates serious complications, as most insurance companies will not allow a minor child to receive life insurance benefits directly until they reach the age of majority. And the age of majority varies between states—with some it’s 18, and others it’s 21.

If a child is named as a beneficiary and has yet to reach the age of majority, the claim proceeds will be paid to the child’s legal guardian, who will be responsible for managing those funds until the child comes of age. Given this, in the event a minor is named you’ll need to go to court to be appointed as legal guardian, even if you’re the child’s parent. This is why we recommend never naming a minor child as a life insurance beneficiary, even as a backup to the primary beneficiary.

Rather than naming a minor child as a life insurance beneficiary, it’s often better to set up a trust to receive the proceeds. By doing that, the proceeds would be paid into the trust, and whomever is named as trustee will follow the steps above to collect the insurance benefits, put them in the trust, and manage the funds for the child’s benefit.

Whatever you decide, you should consult with us as your Personal Family Lawyer® to determine the best options for passing along your life insurance benefits and other assets to minor children.

Provided you fill out the forms properly and include a certified copy of the death certificate, insurance companies typically pay out life insurance claims quickly. In fact, some claims are paid within one-to-two weeks of the start of the process, and rarely do claims take more than 60 days to be paid. Most insurance companies will offer you the option to collect the proceeds via a mailed check or transfer the funds electronically directly to your account.

Sometimes an insurance company will request you to send in a completed W-9 form (Request for Taxpayer Identification Number and Certification) from the IRS in order to process a claim. Most of the time, a W-9 is requested only if there is some question or issue with the records, such as having an address provided in a claim form that doesn’t match the one on file.

A W-9 is simply a way for the insurance company to verify information to prevent fraudulent activity. To this end, don’t be alarmed if you’re asked for a W-9. It’s a common verification practice, and it doesn’t automatically mean the company suspects you of fraud or plans to deny your claim.

While collecting life insurance proceeds is a fairly simple process, it’s always a good idea to consult with us as your Personal Family Lawyer® if you have any questions or need help to ensure the process goes as smoothly as possible during the often-chaotic period following a loved one’s death.

We don’t just draft documents; we ensure you make informed and empowered decisions about life and death, for yourself and the people you love. That’s why we offer a Family Wealth Planning Session, ™ during which you will get more financially organized than you’ve ever been before, and make all the best choices for the people you love. You can begin by calling our office today to schedule a Family Wealth Planning Session and mention this article to find out how to get this $750 session at no charge. Schedule online today.