It is certainly as important as the act of initially creating a sound and tailored estate plan to take an occasional peek at it thereafter and make tweaks as necessary.
Because those tweaks — and, sometimes, major revisions — will become necessary. Life has a habit of rendering any “immutable and forever” plan, well, mutable.
That observation essentially serves as the bottom line uniformly espoused by a group of financial industry commentators recently in an article in which they offered up their views regarding the need to periodically adjust estate planning documents and legal instruments.
One of those contributors quickly underscored the importance of timely updates to estate plans through the summary telling of the following tale.
To wit: One client of his designated a guardian for his minor children years ago while drafting a will. He thereafter let planning details lapse, with a full 20 years going by before he got around to modifying that centrally important legal document.
While doing so, he noticed that his guardian choice of years ago for his minor children had subsequently become an alcoholic.
“Had the client died a few years earlier,” states the aforementioned article, “there would have been a major problem.” Luckily, that was not the case.
The story is told simply to convey a point, which can be easily buttressed by a veritable boatload of other cautionary tales — some with potentially dire outcomes thankfully avoided, others with abjectly negative endings — pointing to the need for every estate planner in
Massachusetts and across the United States to occasionally revisit and update their plans.
An experienced estate administration attorney can help them do that.