| • Complete the Confidential Estate Planning Information form.
This form provides the information we need to make our planning recommendations. You may download the appropriate Confidential Estate Planning Information form by clicking on the title. By choosing the fillable form, you will be able to fill in the form, save it to your hard drive, and email it to us if you have Adobe Reader, which is free software. You may also choose a printable form that can be completed by hand. To get or update Adobe Reader, click here. If you are unable to download this form, please contact us and we will mail a copy to you. The forms are: Fillable: Single Married Domestic Partners Printed: Single Married Domestic Partners • Schedule a Meeting.
Contact us to schedule the initial meeting. If health or mobility is a factor, we are happy to meet with you at your home. Please provide us the completed Confidential Estate Planning Information form prior to our meeting.
• First Meeting.
The first meeting should take about 90 minutes, depending on the complexity of the recommended estate plan. We will discuss your planning objectives, consider the effect of estate taxes, if any, determine if trust planning is appropriate for children or other beneficiaries, address the advantages of minimizing probate administration using funded revocable trusts ("living trusts"), and review the options for selecting executors, trustees and guardians who will administer the estate plan. Using charts or diagrams for illustration, we will present an overall estate plan recommendation. The plan will include the suggested ownership of certain assets and beneficiary designations for life insurance, annuity policies and retirement accounts. After the plan has been discussed and your questions answered, we will review our fee schedule and quote a fixed fee for the estate plan. If the proposed fee is agreeable, we will prepare an engagement letter summarizing the scope of the work, the fee and terms for payment. If you decide not to proceed with the estate plan, you will be charged $200.00 for the estate planning consultation.
• Draft Documents.
Draft documents will be prepared within a week to 10 days after the engagement letter has been signed and returned to us. The drafts will be forwarded to you with summaries and footnotes explaining technical provisions or legal terminology. After reviewing the documents you may decide to schedule a second meeting to discuss the documents further. In many instances our clients are ready to sign the documents after a few questions or changes which may be handled by phone or email.
• Execution.
After the draft documents have been reviewed and appropriate changes made, the documents will be prepared for execution. It is our policy to supervise the execution of the documents at our offices to insure that all legal formalities are observed.
• Original Documents.
We will prepare and mail to you a binder containing (i) your original documents, (ii) a full set of copies, (iii) copies of all correspondence, (iv) a "trust summary" useful for funding the revocable trust, and (v) copies of any beneficiary designations. We will enclose our final invoice with the binder. |
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