Blended families that include stepfamily members, half-siblings, estranged family members, former spouses, new spouses and everything in between are common in our society. Traditional, very simple estate planning may not be sufficient to accomplish estate planning goals in many blended family situations.
Traditionally, estate planning included wills and non-probate tools like transfer-on-death documents. Trusts became common several decades ago for tax savings reasons, but the extra benefit of trusts’ ability to avoid probate was also very handy.
Trusts, as valuable as they can be, are usually a bit more expensive to prepare than simple wills. Until a few decades ago, many attorneys did not have a sufficient level of estate planning sophistication to prepare good trusts, and the cost to prepare trusts was much higher than the cost to prepare wills during that same time period.
Back in those days before many attorneys felt comfortable using trusts, attorneys often had couples with children from prior relationships first sign wills that mirrored each other and then sign a contract that neither spouse/partner would change his or her will for the rest of their lives.
For example, a husband with kids from a prior relationship might marry a wife with kids from a prior relationship. The couple may even have more kids together. The husband and wife might sign wills that give everything owned by either of them to the survivor of them when the first of them dies.
The couple’s wills would typically also include some specific distributions to the pre-marriage kids of the husband and wife.
And the couple might then also sign a separate contract that stated that the surviving spouse would not change his or her will after the first spouse died. This contract would ensure that just because one spouse died first, that spouse’s kids would not be disinherited.
The problem with this structure is that the kids of the first spouse or partner to die might not even be aware of the contract. Such a lack of awareness would empower the surviving spouse or partner to ignore the contract to not change his or her will and completely disinherit the kids of the first spouse or partner to die.
The much, much better estate planning route in the context of blended families today is to use a trust, which is most easily thought of as being a simple set of rules. The trust may be part amendable and part not amendable, to protect each spouse’s/partner’s kids from former relationships.
Trust law requires the trustee, or administrator, of a trust to give a copy of the trust to each beneficiary, the person who owns or will definitely, eventually own something that is in the trust. Trustees are also required to give updates to beneficiaries on a regular basis regarding the assets and money that is in the trust. A surviving spouse or partner of a couple’s joint trust will likely serve as the trustee when the first spouse or partner dies and will therefore have a legally enforceable responsibility to honor the shared wishes of both the surviving spouse or partner and the first-deceased spouse or partner.
Lee R. Schroeder is an Ohio licensed attorney at Schroeder Law LLC in Putnam County. He limits his practice to business, real estate, estate planning and agriculture issues in northwest Ohio. He can be reached at [email protected] or at 419-659-2058. This article is not intended to serve as legal advice, and specific advice should be sought from the licensed attorney of your choice based upon the specific facts and circumstances that you face.
Legal-Ease: Hers, his and ours — blended family estate planning & Latest News Update
Legal-Ease: Hers, his and ours — blended family estate planning & More Live News
All this news that I have made and shared for you people, you will like it very much and in it we keep bringing topics for you people like every time so that you keep getting news information like trending topics and you It is our goal to be able to get
all kinds of news without going through us so that we can reach you the latest and best news for free so that you can move ahead further by getting the information of that news together with you. Later on, we will continue
to give information about more today world news update types of latest news through posts on our website so that you always keep moving forward in that news and whatever kind of information will be there, it will definitely be conveyed to you people.
Legal-Ease: Hers, his and ours — blended family estate planning & More News Today
All this news that I have brought up to you or will be the most different and best news that you people are not going to get anywhere, along with the information Trending News, Breaking News, Health News, Science News, Sports News, Entertainment News, Technology News, Business News, World News of this made available to all of you so that you are always connected with the news, stay ahead in the matter and keep getting today news all types of news for free till today so that you can get the news by getting it. Always take two steps forward
Credit Goes To News Website – This Original Content Owner News Website . This Is Not My Content So If You Want To Read Original Content You Can Follow Below Links