Michigan Estate Planning Blog

Why Everyone Should Have an Estate Plan

 

When prepared with an experienced estate planning attorney, estate planning ensures that loved ones are taken care of and your estate is ready to be distributed after you’ve died with as little stress or confusion as possible. Consider estate planning as a tool for peace of mind, says a recent article, “Essential steps for effective estate planning” from MSN.

Clarify your personal and family situation. You’ll want to define your heirs—spouse, partner, children, stepchildren, extended family and others who are important to you. Your marital status matters too—married, single, in a long-term relationship? Do you live in a community property state? Do you have dependents, including children, disabled individuals, or elderly parents? All these facts determine how assets are divided.

Create an inventory of what you own and any debts. This list begins with major assets, such as a home, cars, business shares, retirement funds, and insurance policies. Don’t forget digital assets, including social media sites, cryptocurrency, websites and any e-commerce businesses. Also list your debts, including home mortgage, car loan, credit cards, home equity loans and any other debts. Do you have any complex holdings, like offshore accounts or private companies?

What are your goals for your family and your wealth? Who do you want to receive your property, and what if those people aren’t living when you die? Do you have a plan to pay for college for children or grandchildren? Are you prepared for the costs of long-term care for yourself or a loved one? If there is an organization or a cause important to you, it might also be part of your estate plan. These decisions may feel like they don’t need to be made until sometime in the future. However, the future has a way of showing up way before we’re ready.

Put the plan into action. Make an appointment with an experienced estate planning attorney to put your wishes into an actual estate plan. Name an executor to manage your will, and a guardian if you have minor children. Check on beneficiary designations on all bank and investment accounts and life insurance policies. Discuss the use of a trust with the attorney to see if it would be useful. Review potential tax impact and plan for any estate taxes on the state or federal level. Be sure there’s enough liquidity so your executor will be able to settle the costs of your estate and help loved ones while the estate is being settled.

Get good professional advice. Estate planning is the creation of living documents, and they need to be updated as your life and laws change. An experienced estate planning attorney will be able to help you realize goals in the face of change and protect your family now and for future generations.

Reference: MSN (June 11, 2025) “Essential steps for essential estate planning”

When Should You Update Your Estate Plan?

 

Almost everyone who completes an estate plan says they feel a great peace of mind knowing they have accomplished this. However, estate plans need to be periodically reviewed to reflect the changes and events of life. According to a recent article from Florida Today, “Life can change on a dime. Here’s how to tell if it’s time to change your estate plan,” certain major life events are the most common reasons to update an estate plan.

Known as “trigger events,” these include marriage, divorce, birth or adoption, death of a loved one, moving to a new state and retirement. If someone named in an estate plan to act as executor, trustee, or guardian dies, those roles must be filled promptly, and the documents must be updated accordingly.

Updating beneficiary designations is all too often overlooked. Beneficiary designations on life insurance policies, retirement accounts and Payable On Death (POD) accounts override any provisions in a will or trust. If you don’t update beneficiary designations, someone you love may end up with nothing, while someone you once loved could receive an unexpected and generous gift. Review these designations to be sure that they reflect your current wishes, not your past loves.

Laws change, both on a state and federal level. While you may be following the headlines to learn what changes are coming to the estate tax from Washington, your own state might make changes to how property is transferred. A change to the law could undo your estate plan’s intentions. Your estate planning attorney monitors local, state and federal changes to laws impacting tax and inheritance. Contact them with your concerns and understand that you may need to make adjustments to ensure that your wishes are followed.

Financial situations change, for good or bad. If you’ve bought real estate, invested in a business, or purchased cryptocurrency, all these need to be addressed by your estate plan. If you’ve declared bankruptcy or have been hit with large medical debts, your estate plan may need to be adjusted. The same goes for charitable giving goals. If you have a change of heart about a charity you used to support and want another charity to benefit from your generosity, you’ll need to put this change on paper.

Children grow up, even though it may not seem like this will ever happen when they are young. When they reach adulthood and the necessary level of maturity, you may want to name them as executors, trustees, or healthcare surrogates in place of other family members. This is also a good time to review trusts that contain provisions regarding specific milestones.

An estate plan includes protecting your health and well-being. It’s advisable to make sure that your estate planning documents are ready for any eventuality, especially if you haven’t reviewed them in a long time. This includes Power of Attorney, healthcare directives, living wills, HIPAA release forms and other relevant documents. Medicaid planning is something to discuss with your attorney as part of planning for long-term care.

If it’s been more than three years since your estate plan was reviewed, even if nothing in your life has changed, it’s a good idea to review your estate plan. Even minor discrepancies or changes can have significant impacts. Regular reviews help to identify any gaps, ensure that the estate plan works with current law and reflect changes to financial status and relationships.

Reference: Florida Today (May 31, 2025) “Life can change on a dime. Here’s how to tell if it’s time to change your estate plan”

Do You Need a Will, a Living Trust, or Both in Your Estate Plan?

 

Your estate plan will benefit from having a professionally prepared will, living trust, or both, to be sure that your assets reach the right person after your passing. Both accomplish different goals, so you’ll want to be sure they match your situation and overall estate planning goals. A recent article from MSN, “Living Trust vs. Will: What’s the Difference and Which One Do You Need,” explains it all.

First, what is a will?

It’s a final set of instructions serving several additional purposes. Your will names exactly who should receive assets, including family members, charitable organizations, or friends, in any combination you wish. However, a will does more.

Your will is also the document needed to name a guardian for any minor children. If you have children under age 18, your will should name a guardian and a backup guardian, in case your first candidate can’t take the child or children into their homes. Without this document, your children’s future will rest in the court’s hands.

A will goes into effect only after death. It has no control over assets while you are living, and you can make changes to it as often as you wish. The will also goes through probate, meaning the court will review it, decide whether it’s valid, appoint your executor and allow the executor to proceed with carrying out the instructions.

A Living Trust becomes effective as soon as it’s established, while you are living. It allows you to transfer ownership of assets into the trust, which functions as a separate legal entity. For a living trust, also known as a revocable trust, the grantor is the person who establishes the trust and can be the trustee, which means that you maintain complete control over the assets in the trust. The trust document includes a successor trustee, the person who takes control of the trust upon your death or incapacity.

Trusts have certain advantages over wills. For one thing, if you become sick and can’t manage your affairs, the successor trustee can use the assets in the trust to do things like pay bills and keep your household running. Assets in the trust don’t go through the probate process, which streamlines the distribution process. Unlike wills, trust documents remain private, so nosy relatives or neighbors can’t gain access to your private information. A will becomes public once it is entered into probate, but trusts are private.

Revocable trusts are excellent estate planning tools if you want to avoid the delays of probate and prefer privacy. Trusts are also better for setting restrictions on how assets are managed and when they are distributed. You can use a trust to name multiple beneficiaries and determine precisely when you believe heirs will be ready to inherit responsibly.

Which one do you need?

If you have young children, you need a will to name a guardian. If your estate is straightforward, a will can do the job. If you don’t mind having your estate go through probate, and some people don’t, then a will is right for you.

If you own property in multiple states, probate is going to be very complicated and take a long time. A living trust should be considered. A living trust also works better in case of incapacity.

Talk with an experienced estate planning attorney to determine which of these two documents is best for you. They’ll help you understand the pros and cons depending on your situation.

Reference: MSN (May 28, 2025) “Living Trust vs. Will: What’s the Difference and Which One Do You Need”

Late in Life Marriages Require Estate and Financial Planning

 

Marriage at any age involves compromises of varying degrees. When couples marry late in life, the financial and legal decisions revolve around different issues. Who pays for the bucket-list trips? Whose name should go on the deed to the new condo or the home the newlyweds will share until death parts them?

A recent article from The New York Times, “Remarrying in Retirement? It Can Make Money Management Tricky,” explains a growing trend as Americans 65 and older are getting remarried at an increasing frequency. The marriage rate increased from 4.6 people per thousand in 1990 to 5.1 in 2022. By contrast, the remarriage rate in the general population plunged by about 50%.

Merging money and estate planning can get complicated when you marry later in life. People over 65 are more likely to have assets, including retirement accounts and real estate. There may also be children from prior marriages.

Women often arrive in second marriages with fewer assets than their male partners. However, this is more likely to be the case for older women whose generations were limited by social restrictions on women’s earning capacity and career advancement.

For women in this situation, a second marriage can become financially perilous if they don’t have a claim on a home that is to be inherited by stepchildren. Women who have contributed to a household for decades but whose name was never added to the deed very often find themselves in a no-win situation.

If heirs decide to sell the house after a father dies, the stepmother will not have a legal claim to the property or the proceeds unless the deed was changed. Promises made and provisions in a will won’t overcome the deed, even if the surviving spouse was on the mortgage.

For older couples, prenuptial agreements, life insurance and trusts are powerful tools to protect each other. A prenup forces a conversation about what happens if the marriage ends, whether by divorce or death. It may be an uncomfortable discussion, but it can shed light on assumptions about important issues. If both partners have children from prior marriages and intend to give their children all their estate regardless of their partner’s needs, it’s better to know this from the onset.

Life insurance is a good way to provide for spouses or children from prior marriages. In some cases, allocating different percentages of contributions to household expenses is used to address wealth disparities. The math sometimes gets complicated. However, every couple hopefully finds a fair resolution.

In many cases, trusts can be used to protect a financial legacy. This is especially appropriate if one spouse has large healthcare costs not covered by Medicare and needs long-term care. A Medicaid Asset Protection Trust (MAPT) is often used for these situations.

These types of legal structures can seem cold-hearted and transactional. However, they are necessary to ensure that the surviving spouse has a financial cushion if they don’t have enough resources of their own.

Conflicts often arise when a homeowner gives their surviving spouse the right to live in a home they owned together until the spouse’s death. The children from a prior marriage must wait to sell the house, which can engender bad feelings towards the second spouse.

For some couples, remarriage doesn’t make sense from a financial standpoint. For example, marriage triggers inheritance rules for certain retirement accounts. If one spouse has a pension, they may be legally required to name the other as a beneficiary. If the person with the account had wanted it to go to a child, the spouse would have to cede their right to it with extra documentation. Remarriage might also mean sacrificing alimony, pension benefits, or Social Security payments.

An experienced estate planning attorney can address many of these concerns through trusts and other estate planning strategies. Ideally, this should be done before you say “I do” again, but it can also be done after you’ve walked down the aisle together.

Reference: The New York Times (May 10, 2025) “Remarrying in Retirement? It Can Make Money Management Tricky”

What’s Best Way to Pass the Family Home to Heirs?

 

 

Transferring a home to heirs after death can be a complex process. Many states have created a new path for homeowners to document their wishes, using a “transfer on death deed.” However, according to a recent article from The Wall Street Journal, “When Leaving the House to Your Heirs Backfires,” this method is far from foolproof. It even describes the TODD as a “blunt instrument.”

The complications of life make the TODD a disaster waiting to happen. People make mistakes filling out the forms, heirs are disinherited and the deed can conflict with the goals of the overall estate plan. Then it gets bad.

One man named his niece as the beneficiary using a TODD. However, his ex-wife set the house on fire and destroyed it a few days after his death. The niece owned only the land and lost the battle to get any insurance proceeds for the house. The case went to court, and the judge determined that while the TODD form made the niece the sole owner, the uncle was the insured, so the insurance didn’t cover her loss.

This is admittedly a dramatic example. However, it’s one of many cases where what seems like a simple solution in estate planning becomes a complicated, expensive mess.

Many homeowners are considering selling their homes, which have soared in value, paying significant capital gains taxes, or giving them to their children tax-free after death.

Wills are used to instruct how property is to be distributed after death. After death, the wills are submitted to the court, which then supervises the transfer of assets through probate. Many people set up trusts to avoid having their assets go through probate. The trusts contain detailed instructions for how they want the property to be distributed.

The challenge with trusts is to ensure that they are funded; that is, the assets intended to go into the trust must be retitled properly so the trust owns them. If the trusts aren’t funded, they don’t work. When created by an experienced estate planning attorney and with a capable trustee, trusts are an excellent way to transfer property.

Transfer on death deeds were created to avoid probate in a streamlined manner. When the owner passes, the beneficiary named on the deed can take direct ownership of the house, in much the same way named beneficiaries receive assets like 401(k)s or life insurance policies.

However, if any missteps occur, the results will not be what was intended. Homeowners can revoke a TODD at any time, which can undo whatever estate plan was created. If a TODD is used without being coordinated with the overall estate plan, there can be problems.

States are still making changes to these new deed laws because of cases like the owner’s ex setting the house on fire. In another case, a man is fighting for a 200-acre family farm left to him by his father, who was awarded the farm in a divorce settlement. The father made payments on a rent-to-own agreement with his maternal grandparents, which started in 1999. The grandparents said the TODD violated an anti-transfer provision in the contract and cancelled the contract. The Minnesota Court of Appeals agreed with the grandparents. The man has now lost the farm, despite more than two decades of payments made by both the father and son.

One last example and a reason to be wary of using a TODD: an 80-year-old man left his girlfriend a $700,000 house using a transfer on death deed. She got a surprise tax bill for $25,000 in estate taxes. She could have avoided the surprise if he had left her the house as a bequest in his will.

Talk with an experienced estate planning attorney about how to best transfer the family home and integrate it with the rest of your estate plan. Transferring such a sizable asset requires careful consideration to avoid unnecessary complications.

Reference: The Wall Street Journal (May 10, 2025) “When Leaving the House to Your Heirs Backfires”

What Happens If You Die Without a Will?

 

No matter where you live, dying without a will is going to lead to a costly, stressful and expensive experience for loved ones. It will also make distributing assets more complicated than necessary. A recent article from the Daily Journal, “Intestate succession: The risks and complications of dying without a will,” makes a strong case for having an estate plan, including a will, prepared by an experienced estate planning attorney.

When there is no will, assets must be submitted to a local court to be probated, including transferring legal title to property from the decedent to heirs. Most probate proceedings take at least 18 months and, in some cases, can extend to several years. There are attorney and administrative fees based on the gross value of the assets plus taxable gains on sales and receipts.

What is a very rough estimate of costs for an estate with a total value of $1 million when there is no will? While it varies by jurisdiction, a total cost of $30,000 is not unusual. Add costs like maintaining a property, paying a mortgage and other expenses; you can see why having a will is better.

Another reason to have a will: the delays of probate can make it difficult for the estate to pay expenses. If the personal representative (executor) needs to pay bills but the estate account is not funded, even more complexities and costs will occur.

Laws vary from state to state over who receives the estate assets when there is no will. California is a community property state, so that the spouse will receive all the community property and a portion of the separate property. How much separate property will be received depends upon the number of children, grandchildren, living parents or siblings and their own children.

In most states, the distribution of assets is governed by kinship. If there is no surviving spouse, the estate may pass equally to children or their children. However, the court may need to search for blood relatives without children or grandchildren. If you have no children but have relatives you haven’t spoken to for years and no will, they may become your heirs.

The simplest way to prevent a nightmare for your loved ones is to consult an experienced estate planning attorney and create an estate plan, including a Will, Power of Attorney and Healthcare Proxy.

A will is used to name a guardian for minor children, an executor to administer the estate and set the terms for the distribution of property. Without a will, the court makes these decisions, including who will raise minor children and where they will live. A court-appointed guardian will not be the same as a beloved family member, altering the course of children’s lives. For parents of young children, this should motivate an appointment with an estate planning attorney.

Estate planning also includes a detailed check on the ownership status of accounts for the option to name a designated beneficiary. Insurance policies, investment accounts, pensions and bank accounts will likely allow a beneficiary to be named. These assets will go directly to designated people, no matter what your will says or if, despite reading this article, you decline to have a will created.

Whatever your situation and wherever you live, you’ll want a will created to leave a legacy of caring for your loved ones.

Reference: Daily Journal (May 5, 2025) “Intestate succession: The risks and complications of dying without a will”

Estate Planning Documents Every Family Needs

 

 

Estate planning is not something only very old or very wealthy people need to do. Anyone who doesn’t want to leave a mess for their loved ones after they’ve died or if they are too sick to be able to make decisions, needs an estate plan. A recent article from Military.com, “Wills and More: These Are the Legal Documents Every Military Household Needs,” isn’t just for military families. Estate planning is for everyone, and one last important point: estate planning documents require upkeep to be effective.

The foundations of an estate plan include a will, beneficiary designation, and powers of attorney.

A will details who you want to receive your property when you’ve died and names an executor in charge of your estate. If there is no will, the laws of your state come into play. You may not like who is chosen to manage and distribute your estate, but it will be too late for you or your family.

Beneficiary designations apply to bank, investment, and retirement accounts, life insurance policies, and any asset permitting a beneficiary to be named. If your will has one instruction but the beneficiary designation says another, the beneficiary designation wins. This is just one example of why updating your estate planning documents is important. You may have opened an account decades ago and named a person who is no longer in your life or living.

Power of Attorney (POA) is a legal document that gives you the authority to make legal and financial decisions if you are incapacitated. A related document, Power of Healthcare Attorney, permits someone else to make healthcare decisions. Think of the two POAs as a mini-succession plan, giving authority over essential parts of your life to someone else if you become incapacitated.

If these documents aren’t in place, family members will need to go to court to obtain guardianship or conservatorship to take over routine matters like paying bills and being able to talk with doctors and make medical decisions. This is an expensive, time-consuming, and stressful process, easily avoided by having these documents prepared by an estate planning attorney.

Here’s an example of why updating documents is so important. Let’s say your mother receives a diagnosis of Alzheimer’s Disease. She’s still functioning, but the disease is progressing. Once someone is incapacitated, they are not allowed to sign legal documents. If you fail to update her POAs and other estate planning documents on a timely basis, the documents can be challenged and may be deemed invalid.

Events requiring estate planning document updates include happy things like marriage, welcoming a child or grandchild into the family, or coming into a large inheritance. Unpleasant events require updates as well: divorce, death, a serious disease, or financial losses.

Remember, estate planning is about protecting your family and your property. You've protected yourself and your loved ones by making a will, keeping beneficiary designations updated, and having POAs and related documents for incapacity. Your family will be spared the stress and cost of cleaning up a mess, which is probably not the legacy you want to leave. Meet with an experienced estate planning attorney and get started on this most critical task.

Reference: Military.com (April 21, 2025) “Wills and More: These Are the Legal Documents Every Military Household Needs”

Is Power of Attorney for Health Care Needed If You’re Healthy?

 

Like most people, a 61-year-old man never thought he would have a health crisis. Neither did his family. However, he was struck with a sudden heart attack, followed by complications leading to a brain injury and he became incapacitated. The family was faced with a terrible situation in addition to their father’s health crisis.

The couple had never done any estate planning, nor did they have a Power of Attorney for Health Care. The spouse assumed she would have the legal right to make medical choices for her husband. However, without a POAHC, she had no standing. A recent article from the Wisconsin Newspaper Association, “Wisconsin Spouses can’t make medical decisions without this document,” should serve as a wake-up call for families across the country, since this is not a one-state issue.

There is no automatic right to make healthcare decisions for an incapacitated partner. Unless both spouses are joint owners, one can’t access bank accounts. Without having the right estate planning documents in place, a spouse won’t be able to make decisions, pay bills, or transfer money between accounts to ensure the household runs smoothly.

Medical decisions for the man fell into legal limbo and got tangled up in red tape. Instead of focusing on his recovery, they embarked on a legal process that could have easily been avoided with one document.

First, the family had to petition the court for legal authority over his medical care, known as guardianship. This was an expensive, time-consuming and emotionally exhausting process, all going on while they were adjusting to this dramatic change in his health.

Making matters worse, he was not a compliant patient in his altered state. He wandered frequently, and one night, he got out of the hospital on a bitterly cold night. To make matters worse, the hospital couldn’t discharge him to a rehabilitation facility until the court awarded the family guardianship. The family was bombarded with questions about the status of his case, which was scheduled weeks away.

At the same time, there were further problems with the hospital without a designated health care agent. First, the hospital administrators insisted that the patient be discharged to a long-term care facility. They then said the insurance company had stopped paying, so he had to go home. When the family sought help from the county, the hospital threatened to tell the courthouse that the family was neglecting him and threatened the guardianship process.

The hospital reneged on its promise to help provide at-home nursing care when the guardianship process was finally completed. The family was left on their own to find appropriate care.

This nightmare could have been avoided if the couple had an estate plan, including naming a healthcare agent with a Power of Attorney for Healthcare. When he became incapacitated, his wife or adult child could have had the legal authority to make health care decisions on his behalf without the delays, added expense and frustration of court proceedings.

Everyone should have a Power of Attorney for Healthcare, sometimes known as a Healthcare Proxy, to name another person to step in and make decisions for them in case of incapacity. We never know what will happen, even to our healthiest family members. Anyone over age 18 needs to have a POAHC. Talk with your estate planning attorney and take care of this before it’s needed.

Reference: Wisconsin Newspaper Association (April 7, 2025) “Wisconsin Spouses can’t make medical decisions without this document”

Three Top Excuses Heard by Estate Planning Attorneys

 

Recognition of your mortality and taking the time to plan for tying up the business of your life are two very different things. Estate planning attorneys hear reasons for delay all the time. However, the explanations aren’t going to help your family when they have to administer an unprepared estate while grieving. A recent article from MarketWatch, “The top 3 excuses people make to put off estate planning--and why they’re all wrong,” offers food for thought.

I don’t own enough to need an estate plan. Even if you die in debt, you need an estate plan to prevent loved ones from having costly problems like probate, taxes and other issues. If you’re in a nursing home and all you own is a bank account with a named beneficiary, you may not need a will. However, you definitely need medical directives, including:

Healthcare Power of Attorney (or Healthcare Proxy), someone you name who can make medical decisions.

HIPAA Release so a person of your choosing can access health insurance information and medical records.

Designated representative for Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security

Living Will to express wishes for end-of-life care. Do you want to be kept on life support if you aren’t expected to regain consciousness? What about artificial feeding? These are tough issues to address. However, without expressing your wishes, your family won’t know what you want.

Procrastination has worked before, so why change now? Many people are waiting to see if changes will come to federal estate tax exemptions, which are set to happen at the end of 2025 unless Congress acts. No one knows what will happen. However, if your estate is hovering near the $7 million mark and you wait until the last minute to make changes, your estate could become taxable. Creating and executing an estate plan takes time, so that procrastinating could cost your heirs 40% of your estate.

I don’t know where to start. This is what experienced estate planning attorneys are for. Just as you wouldn’t be advised to perform surgery on yourself, you need the services of a skilled and trained estate planning attorney to create an estate plan to achieve your goals.

Start by gathering any documents you might already have, including investment and pension accounts, life insurance policies, titles and deeds and anything you think might be relevant. Next, make an appointment with an estate planning attorney who can explain the process, offer strategic tools to minimize taxes, transfer wealth and prepare an estate plan to protect you and those you love.

If you need more of an incentive consider this: putting a loved one through the process of a scavenger hunt to identify documents, spend their own money to retain counsel to go to court to obtain a guardianship if you are incapacitated and need their help, or be powerless as a lifetime of work evaporates in estate taxes, will teach a valuable lesson of what not to do. If you’d prefer to be remembered with love and affection and not resentment, it’s time to stop procrastinating.

Reference: MarketWatch (April 17, 2025) “The top 3 excuses people make to put off estate planning--and why they’re all wrong”

Just the Facts on Estate Planning

 

While you do need an estate planning attorney to prepare an estate plan properly, you don’t need to go to law school to understand basic facts about estate planning. As reported in a recent article from the Pauls Valley Democrat, “Some real facts about estate planning,” getting the right information on estate planning basics can alleviate unnecessary anxiety and help resolve concerns.

You can use a trust to avoid taxes. Well, not always. Creating a trust alone doesn’t save taxes. It depends upon the type of taxes being discussed—income taxes, federal estate taxes, state estate taxes, or inheritance taxes—and the type of trust being created.

The person who establishes the trust, known as the grantor, pays income tax on a revocable living trust. If the trust is an irrevocable trust, income held in the trust will be taxed at rates near the highest individual tax rate.

Trusts do offer possible estate tax savings, depending upon the type of trust and how it’s structured. However, estate taxes aren’t even a concern for most people, since an individual must own more than $13.9 million of assets at the time of their death before any federal estate tax applies. Whether or not this historically high exemption level remains after December 31, 2025, is still unknown and you should speak with your estate planning attorney to be sure you are prepared if your estate is near the $7 million level just to be sure.

The heir pays estate taxes. Not always. Beneficiaries don’t pay the estate tax. The estate pays federal and state estate taxes. Federal estate taxes apply only to the estates of people with large amounts of wealth, who have likely done the proper estate planning to avoid paying estate taxes in the first place.

If you live in one of the few states with an inheritance tax, then you’ll pay inheritance tax based on the laws of your state.

If inherited assets include a large amount of appreciation, there won’t be any capital gains taxes paid because the recipient receives the assets at their fair market value at the date of death. For example, let’s say your mother dies owning $100,000 of land, which she bought in 1958 for $10,000. If she sold the land, she’d pay capital gains tax on $90,000. However, her heir’s basis is $100,000, and they could sell the land for $100,000 and pay no taxes.

The best way to avoid worrying about estate planning is to schedule a consultation with an experienced estate planning attorney and discuss your unique situation. They’ll be able to create a plan to minimize your taxes, discuss whether a trust would be appropriate for you and your heirs, and give you the peace of mind that comes with knowing you’ve taken care of yourself and the next generation.

Reference: Pauls Valley Democrat (April 11, 2025) “Some real facts about estate planning”