When to Update your Estate Plan
A frequent question our estate planning clients ask is how often they need to review and update their estate planning documents. Historically, it was common for attorneys to suggest that their clients come in to review their estate plans every 5-7 years. While there are periods in your life during which it may be prudent to update your estate planning documents within a few years, most estate planning documents today are drafted to encompass a multitude of consistencies and to grow with your changing situation.
We recommend that our clients contact us upon a significant change in their lives, such as retirement, divorce, death or birth of an important family member, diagnosis of a terminal or cognitively degenerative disease, or children reaching the age of majority. Such events can generate changes in a client’s fiduciary selection or distribution terms and can be an important time to update the language within an estate plan to coincide with the client’s changing intent and to remove provisions which are no longer relevant.
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