Maintaining Your Estate Plan
Maintaining your estate plan is vital, and it doesn’t have to be hard. Let the Hammond Law Group be your guide.
The Legacy Protection Plan maintenance program makes it easy to keep your estate plan current, effective and up-to-date.
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- Without attention, your estate plan will likely have major gaps.
- If your plan isn’t maintained, you may leave headaches for your family that could have been avoided, including probate
- Your family could be forced to make difficult healthcare decisions without your guidance.
- Your kids could fight for years over the things you didn’t get around to dealing with (division of your personal property, healthcare decisions, funeral plans, and more)
What do you get?
- Annual Review – spend time with an attorney and paralegal each year filling in the details of your plan.
- Exclusive monthly workshops that support your plan.
- Complimentary basic changes to your trust annually
- Discounts on any legal work outside of the maintenance plan.
- Free updated financial powers of attorney every year, ensuring they will always work.
- No Probate Guarantee.
- Get your family aligned on the same page with free family meetings.
- Receive a Success Path with specific steps to take along the way.
Catherine Hammond, the founder of Hammond Law Group, knew she wanted to be an estate planning attorney early when she had to petition the court to become her mother’s guardian due to early-onset Alzheimer’s. She and her brothers fought over money and healthcare decisions at a time when they most needed one another’s support. Catherine’s mother’s journey would have been so much easier if the right planning had been in place.
You’ve taken the first step but now what? We understand how hard it can be. We have helped over 3,000 clients like you create comprehensive and effective estate plans. However, that’s only the beginning. Even the best plan won’t work if it’s not given the regular attention it deserves maintained. Are you setting your family up for headaches and heartache? We’ve seen too many tragic situations where clients failed to fund all of their assets into their trust, never got around to completing their personal property memo, or other important items in their binder failed to update their documents when dynamics in their personal lives changed or didn’t have “The Conversation” with their family and end-of-life decisions tear their family apart.
There are quite a few reasons your estate plan might fail when you or your loved ones need it the most:
- Powers of Attorney that are not updated annually may not be accepted by banks, title companies, and other institutions.
- Funding is never completed or new assets are not added to your revocable living trust. Did you buy a 2nd home? Move or refinance? Open a new bank or investment account? Remember to transfer in all of your original assets? If not, your loved ones may go through probate when you die despite the fact you set up a trust.
- Your loved ones’ lives and relationships with you may change over time. As these things happen, you may need to adjust things. Who is the best choice for your Successor Trustee today? Have your wishes on how to divide your assets among your loved ones or charitable beneficiaries changed? Do you now need divorce protection for your children? Should you stagger the distributions to your beneficiaries? Failing to update your trust as your world changes can cause your plan to be ineffective in accomplishing what you really want and what your beneficiaries really need.
- You never have The Conversation with your family so they’re left to make healthcare decisions without your guidance.
- You fail to write a Letter of Intent to your Successor Trustee so they don’t have all the tools necessary to carry out your plan.
- Your life changes and it’s never reflected in your plan: What has changed in your life? Do your kids now have kids? Have they gotten married, divorced, or moved? Have there been changes in your health?
- Have you completed your Personal Property Memorandum, gather a list of your assets for your Successor Trustee, and express your burial or cremation and funeral wishes? Or Have you completed the other tasks outside your documents that make up a comprehensive estate plan? Do you even know what those tasks are?
- Do your successor trustees know what to do WHEN something happens to you?
We have learned over the last 15 years that without regular maintenance, most estate plans will fail. We promised you that we will be there when you and your family need us the most. That we will guide you throughout your life in all things estate planning. In order for us to fulfill our promise, we developed a maintenance program called the Legacy Protection Plan and have discovered that it is the best way to fulfill that promise. Unfortunately, most clients who are not members of the Legacy Protection Plan have estate plans which are out of date and will not work in the way they intended. It truly hurts when a client dies having spent money to set up a trust and they still leave a mess for their family.
There are so many things that you must do to make your estate plan more effective outside of the legal documents. Our exclusive Legacy Protection Plan workshops will guide you through many of them. For example, each year we teach Legacy Protection Plan members how to write a Letter of Intent, step by step. This letter could be the most powerful one you’ll ever write. It provides a direct, non-legal explanation to your loved ones, outlining the reasons behind the choices you made in the legal documents as well as your wishes and values. We offer Trustee School so you and your Successor Trustees know exactly what to do when your time comes. Some of our workshops go beyond your documents and estate plans to help you live a better life in a variety of ways.
Other critical instructions most clients fail to complete, leaving a mess for their families:
- Outline your burial/cremation and funeral wishes then give them to your family (or plan for these things and ensure there’s money available to pay for it)
- Update your Asset List with your current assets annually
- Communicate with your family about your end-of-life wishes
- Make sure your Successor Trustee knows exactly what to do when you’re gone
- Create and maintain your personal property memorandum
With membership in the Legacy Protection Plan maintenance program, you’ll receive a detailed path to success to guide you through all of these elements, with specific instructions for each step. You’ll meet with an attorney and a paralegal annually to update your documents and check in on the status of each step. You’ll get guidance from us each year on what needs your attention and help in making it happen.
Here’s how to join:
- Fill out this form: https://learn.coloradoestateplan.com/
- Schedule your first LPP review with an attorney.
- Rest easy knowing your affairs are truly in order
If you would like to know more about your Legacy Protection Plan member benefits or are interested in becoming a member, please contact us at 719.520.1474
