5 Things to Consider When Picking an Estate Planner

Estate planning or inheritance planning is a speciaialized art, one that comes with practise and experience. To go back one step though, you might ask yourself why the need for an estate planner – in an act of modesty I have witnessed so often that I have lost count, people always say their affairs are much too simple to warrant engaging an estate planner. Often this is false modesty. An estate planner would at a minimum be a qualified and competent in drafting a will, from the information required to compose the will, he would be able to inform the client of the likely situation if nothing were done – after all, doing nothing is sometimes a viable option. Many clients would on account of the simplicity of their estates require nothing more than a will and a complete set of power of attorney documents, which can often be had for well under a couple of hundred pounds. A decent estate planning professional would provide a service hard to replicate by any other professional. In the first instance, one would be urged to avoid kits; forms; templates; books indeed anything that requires of you more than basic biographical or factual information – the DIY approach often assume that the person making the arrangements is skilled and experienced in such matters – I saw a client recently who wanted to leave the majority of her assets to her children, but a small gift to her sister – the manner in which she worded her request meant the sister would have got her gift free of inheritance tax, while her children would have been lumbered with a hefty inheritance tax bill – on explaining the potential consequence of her preferred wording she agreed that she wanted her children to have no inheritance tax liability while it was of secondary importance if the value of the gift that her sister received would have been diminished by any taxes. In the main, you are buying the experience of your estate planner. The DIY approach fails to bring context to your estate planning. While a do it yourself will might be cheaper, than engaging the services of a professional, like most things in life, what we pay for is what we get. A suitably experienced solicitor, paralegal or estate planner would be adept at finding out the personal and financial details of your life and document the basis of arriving at the will that you finally draw up. The point of engaging the professional is not merely to produce the document – while this might be seen as some as an end in itself, but to guide you through the process of ensuring that when you are no longer of this world, your wealth is applied in the manner you would have wanted. That your loved ones get the maximum inheritance you would have wanted them to, with a minimum of fuss; expense and interference from outsiders including the taxman. A client recently said to me that it was all very well leaving his wealth to his family, but he failed to see the merit of lumbering them with a mountain of paper work and potential liability to taxation – his was rather an interesting point as there were 2 factors for him to consider, the first was that if the status quo applied at the time of his death, as there was [relatively] little cash in the estate, a good proportion of the assets he was looking to bequeath would have had to have been sold to meet the tax liability, the second point was that with simple manipulation of his estate, there potential liability to inheritance tax was reduced to zero. This brings to mind what a client told me only last week ‘I hear the government is broke, but my money would do far more good in my family than in the treasury’. In sum a professional estate planner would save you and your family far more than he or she costs you – plus to put a cash value on the hassle that is avoided, it pays to consult a professional.