One of the three essential steps to having a complete estate plan focuses on documents. Not having a document is like building an engine, putting it on a lift, and then trying to ride it. You don’t have the body of a car or any semblance of a complete vehicle. Whatever estate planning documents you have (and we typically encourage people to form trusts) must go somewhere. When we hand people their estate planning documents, they ask this exact question. Other people may tell us they plan to immediately head to the bank and place everything in a safety deposit box. Is this the right move?
What To Do With the Documents You Have
Let’s pretend you have a trust, powers of attorney, a living will, and a copy of their recorded deed because it shows how we titled their home in the trust’s name. So where do you keep all this stuff? (We give our clients a notebook with tabs to quickly reference their documents.) To circle back, should all these go into a safety deposit box? There’s nothing wrong with that, but when you need it—if you are incapacitated or pass away, you will not have access to it.
What if something happens, and people must get to your documents when the bank is closed? We don’t recommend putting your documents in a safety deposit box. We tell people to put them where you can get to them. The people you trust (family members, spouse, children, etc.) should also be able to access them if something happens to you. The other component is letting these people know where you keep your documents and how they get to them.
Access is one of the most important things because it protects us from anything happening during our lifetimes. Getting to our documents or allowing others to act on our behalf is paramount. Imagine the son or daughter who is trying to deal with the insurance company after a parent is incapacitated. No one will speak to them without a power of attorney. It’s even worse when there is a power of attorney, but no one knows where it is.
How Many Copies Should I Have?
Although you must ensure your family can access your documents, you do not need to make copies. The biggest reason is that your documents are revocable, which means you can change them. If you change trustees, add a beneficiary, or remove a beneficiary, this change will not be reflected in the copies you handed out to various people. You’ll have to retrieve all of these copies if you change something.
Secondly, you’ve essentially lost all your privacy. In estate planning, that could cause you to lose attorney-client privilege. When people call our office and ask for copies of someone else’s documents, we can’t even tell these people that they represent the person they’re asking about, let alone give them copies. We don’t provide anyone with copies except the client. The client must request the copies in writing, and the reason they want a copy is because they lost a document. We’ll give them copies and then have them come in to sign things again. Our office even gets calls from financial advisors, closing attorneys, and banks asking to see copies of trusts. We don’t provide these copies because we do not want to be responsible for someone losing their attorney-client privilege. Granted, these are your documents, and you can do with them what you want, but we don’t recommend you provide copies to others.
Build Your Estate Plan With Us
Our goal is to protect you, and there is so much more to estate planning than drafting a will. Work with us, and we will explain each process component in a way you understand. This applies to everything from titling your assets to knowing where your documents should go. Contact us today to set up a consultation so we can safeguard you, your estate, and your legacy.
Kevin Tharpe
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