If you care about your family, you will try and plan your estate early enough to avoid probate. If you procrastinate on it, you will end up leaving your family in turmoil.
Lack of proper estate planning leaves your family arguing about the distribution of the estate, encounter long delays and pay a lot in form of legal costs. You can avoid all these by using the right estate planning tools to make your legacy remain.
Although some of the concepts included in the estate planning process can be complex, the effort is worth the while. This is also the reason why you need to have an estate planning attorney with you when making some of the decisions.
This article looks at what happens to your estate when you don’t plan it properly.
Probate at Death
The death probate gets activated the moment you die. The probate court is a part of the government’s effort to have a mechanism that will allow you as a beneficiary to get proper ownership of the assets.The aim of the court is to handle any lawsuit that is brought forward by the intended heirs against any other claimant or creditors. The court tries to identify a person that will administer the estate, cut off all claims and then make the title to the assets clear.Bills Have to Be Paid
During Probate before the court can transfer the assets to the beneficiary, the court ensures that all the genuine claims and bills against the estate are paid off and that any other safeguard is put in place to make sure the estate is transferred successfully.
the role of the executor of the estate in this case is to collect all the assets of the estate, understand their worth, pay any debts that the court has identified, pay off taxes and then notify the beneficiary of what has happened. The executor then distributes the remainder of the estate to the beneficiaries as per the directives in the will.
If you didn’t leave a will behind, the probate court follows the laws of intestate succession. Usually, the court will rule for the assets to remain in the estate for several months to let creditors make claims.
Contesting a Will Drains Assets
The aim of your will is to make sure your family gets your estate fully and with minimal complications. When your will gets to court, then the estate will be drained from payment of legal fees and other expenses. This is why it is vital that you come up with the best estate plan.
Probate Expenses
For most families, the only way to dispute an estate plan is to use a lawyer. The lawyer will charge you for his services, with the structure being hourly, flat fee or percentage based. The last structure takes into consideration the size of the estate under probate.
Additionally, you will pay for other costs that are related to the case. Many people feel obligated to hire the lawyer that created the estate plan, which shouldn’t be the case. You can have one person draft the will, and another lawyer to represent you in probate court.
The cost of running the probate varies according to different aspects. For one, the size of the estate comes into play in determining the cost. Secondly, the duration the case will take also determines how much you spend.
Some states regulate the cost of attorney fees in such cases. A rough estimate is that the cost of the probate process will take between 2 and ten percent of the estate value. If other players contest the estate, then you can guess what happens next.
Now imagine what would have happened if you had an estate plan in place – the cost could be considerably less. The cost of hiring an estate planning attorney to assist you come up with the right plan is not much.
What if You Own Assets in Different States?
You will have to handle the probate process in every state where you have assets, especially real estate. This becomes more expensive and taxing because the cost of handling multiple lawyers across different states is hard.Final Thoughts
The cost of passing your estate to your heirs is high, more when you don’t have an estate plan in place. Talk to an estate planning attorney today to start designing the right plan to assist you avoids some issues. Remember that for your family not to suffer, you need to lessen the probate procedure to the bare minimum.
