Estate Planning 101: The Role of a Financial Advisor

Investment accounts, insurance plans, and retirement accounts come with beneficiary designations. You ought to assign a beneficiary for these accounts so that he is paid the benefits when you become deceased.
A lawyer can help come up with these documents, but he won’t keep updating these designations – it is up to you.
If you haven’t assigned beneficiary designations, the advisor will remind you because his role is to scrutinize your financial documents and make sure they are complete.
Additionally, you ought to update the designations that you initially established when setting up the account. At times you end up with a designation that isn’t updated, which means you will end up with a probate process to determine the allocation.

Coming up with an estate plan is one thing: reading and interpreting it correctly is a different aspect altogether. Since the documents are usually written in legal jargon and might not mean much to you, an advisor will help interpret the information for you.

In as much as the lawyer has given you the lowdown on what can happen in different circumstances, the advisor will emphasize this fact. For instance, he will tell you how the plan changes when you decide to buy another house.
If you came up retirement plan some time back, the advisor tells you what happens when you decide to retire early or late.
A divorce will impact how you make decisions, and it also affects the execution of the plan. A good financial advisor will enumerate these changes and assist you in effecting necessary modifications to suit the plan.
Whenever you find yourself in a tricky situation, try and understand what it will do to the estate plan before you go ahead to make a decision. Don’t be in a rush to come up with decisions before you analyze the entire situation.
Even when the plan is going smoothly, try and make sure you know the effect any upcoming event or process has to your plans and make adjustments.

The advisor will try to be there any time things aren’t going your way. He will do substantial work on your behalf when you aren’t emotionally competent to do so. He, for example, liaises with the lawyer to determine the tax payment procedure or helps you comprehend the mortgage repayment procedure when you inherit a house.
In short, the advisor fills in the gap when you want somebody to handle financial tasks that are beyond your reach at the moment.
Once you have many tasks to handle at the same time, the advisor guides you on what should come first.

If you need to know right away what steps to take when things go wrong, you need an unbiased professional to work with. The advisor will interpret situations on your behalf and explain the predicaments in black and white.
Many times, we sugarcoat everything in such a way that we don’t see things the way they are. This way, we end up not reacting to situations the way we need to. However, when we have a professional who has our best interests at heart, then they will let us know whether what we are doing is right, and the consequences of doing it the wrong way.

For this process to work, you need to get an experienced, highly qualified advisor. You can get referrals from your friends and colleagues. Alternatively, talk to your estate planning lawyer to recommend an excellent financial expert for you to work with today.