Estate planning is a very different type of legal practice. Unlike defending or filing a lawsuit – your concern is not compensation or protecting yourself from a perhaps non meritorious legal matter. Instead, you are doing something most of us truly do not want to do, which is to face our own mortality.
The very same with me: Even though I was a lawyer for many years before preparing my own trust, I completed and funded it just before going on a chaperon trip to the Midwest with my wife.
Therefore, a recent article in the e-newsletter Private Wealth caught my eye. It noted the complaint of many estate planning attorneys that some clients do not execute their estate planning documents even after they are prepared (actually, that sounds all-too familiar). It also noted that many clients go to their estate planning attorneys sometimes just hours before traveling – sometimes calling their attorneys while at the airport. For example, Ms. Kaufman, an attorney at an state planning firm in Washington D.C. recounted:
Nearly every year, a few weeks or days before he leaves on a trip to Europe, a client of Kaufman’s calls her about his will. She makes changes, if necessary, sometimes getting him into the office “literally on his way to the airport,” she says.
Kaufman also recounts how a couple who had been working on a new estate plan for about three years suddenly realized they were not happy with the guardianship provisions in their existing wills. The impetus: A long trip they had just embarked on without the kids. Kaufman wrote codicils addressing the issue and emailed them to the couple, who stopped at a bank in a town along the way and signed them before a notary and witnesses.
So, relax. If you are a procrastinator. . . join the club