Protecting Those You Love Through Estate Planning

This Valentine’s Day, show your love by creating a thoughtful Estate Plan for those you love.

Lisa Malak: Welcome back, everybody. You know Valentine's Day is almost here. And one of the biggest gifts you can give your loved ones, is to plan for the future.

Millaine Wells: Attorney Justin Randall joins us now from Hooper Law Office. Good morning, Justin.

Justin Randall: Good morning.

Millaine Wells: So what is it that people can do with estate planning to show love to the people in their lives?

Justin Randall: So, there really two sort of sides to estate planning that can really be an act of love for your family. The first is really just sitting down with your family, talking with them about your end of life wishes, your healthcare wishes, kind of letting them know what your wishes are, in general for your plan, because that can really help prepare them for what's to come.

Lisa Malak: What's the other side of showing love through your plan? Because it does take a lot of work what you're about to talk about.

Justin Randall: Yeah, so the second side of that, is really getting the documents in place, you know, things like powers of attorney, whether you're going with a will or a trust, getting your document in place that says hey, here's where I want my assets to go, or how I want my family to inherit from me. And that can really help kind of stop conflict upfront because there are things that you can do through that planning that either eliminate potential conflict or provide certain consequences for people who do create problems for your family. And the other thing that you can do as well, that is really an act of love is you can provide a lot of protections for your family members through their inheritance that they wouldn't otherwise receive through their own assets.

Millaine Wells: So having your documents prepared by a qualified estate planning attorney sounds like it is really an important part of having that valuable estate plan.

Justin Randall: Yeah, it absolutely is. I mean, the number one thing you can do is when you go see an attorney to get these documents in places, is really make sure that they focus in this area of law. And that goes for any area of law in particular. But you know, with estate planning, you really want to make sure that the attorney that your family is going to be dealing with after you're gone, is really prepared to help walk them through it, it can make a really difficult time a lot easier to deal with anyway.

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