What to do with your estate planning documents | Fee-Only Financial Advisor, Deer Park, Chicago

Описание: Great job! You’ve gotten your estate planning documents done and you are ready to get to the next step.

But what is the next step? That’s a question we get asked quite frequently. We figured it would be worthwhile to go through three steps that you can take to make sure you are using your documents and keeping them safe.

Physical

So first and foremost is keeping them safe. And this refer to as physical security. What are we doing with the documents that have been printed out with signature on them, and keeping them safe?

We also recommend that you place those into a safe that you have in a home, or if you don’t have a home, maybe a safety deposit box would be a better option. One note with the safety despot box, you want to make sure there is at least one other person on that box with you. Wether you spouse or a close trusted family friend, the reason being, if there was something that would happen to you, you want to make sure there are a few limits, and allocations for someone else to get into that box in the event of an emergency.

Inform Parties

The next step we need to take is to inform folks that are in our documents. While you have likely had conversations with these people who need to act as guardians or guardians of attorney, as an executor or trustees, it is important that we have a conversation with each of these people so they know exactly what they are expected to do in the event of an emergency.

Backup

The final step is to backup, backup, backup. We want to make sure that these documents that you’ve spent both time and money completing are safe and readily accessible where they need to be for each of us. That looks like scanning them in and putting them in a local or cloud based document management bowl. If you are a client of FDS, we actually have many tools available to you for this process.

So, now that we have the documents all figured out, what will we start doing with them? It’s quite likely once you’ve completed your documents, you were provided an instruction sheet. We recommend that you follow that instruction sheet very closely, as it gives you instructions on how to update the beneficiaries for any accounts that may need to be done, change any account titling - as that could be a very important step, or even adjusting the deed to your home in to a trust that may have been created for you.

To the extent that you have any questions, or are unsure as to what steps to take next, reach out, let us know. We’d love to celebrate with you let you know that your documents are done and help you the best way that we can with what exactly needs to be done next.

Thank you so much! We look forward to seeing you soon.

What to do with your estate planning documents | Fee-Only Financial Advisor, Deer Park, Chicago