How to Ensure Your Heirs Use Their Inheritances Wisely
No system is perfect, you can never absolutely guarantee your heirs will be smart with your bequests, but a good estate planning attorney, like Waitz & Downer, can set up a system improving the odds for your inheritors to be safe with their legacies.
Estate Planning Tips
- Consider each beneficiary individually. Minor children and adults with no experience managing money need help to do it right. You can create a trust with specific limits on when and how much they can access your money. You can choose the age or other conditions at which money is distributed or property comes under their full control.
- Educate your heirs. Make sure they understand what you plan to do and why. If they know the provisions, they won’t be surprised at the reading; that should derail most challenges to your will. They will also be reminded it’s not their money — they didn’t earn it. Bequests are gifts you give them because you love them and want them to have it. It’s not unreasonable to put safeguards on your money, and they need to understand they have to follow your wishes.
- Involve your heirs. Let them meet your estate planning attorney and trust administrators. Discuss your plans; they may have good input on what to do or how to do it.
- Specify, in clear and unmistakable language, all your intentions for your property and family.
How Can A Wills & Estate Planning Attorney Help?
Louisiana law differs from practically every other state, with very strict probate laws regulating how wills are executed. Failure to follow those regulations can invalidate your will. If that happens, you die intestate — the State will then decide how your estate is divided.
The law provides numerous avenues for organizing your estate to maximize benefit and safeguard your heirs through trusts and other devices. A skilled attorney can navigate you through all the possibilities and pitfalls and help you choose to the best-case scenario. That attorney will then help you draft a proper will to ensure your legacies go to the people, organizations or causes you choose, at the time and in the way according to your wishes.
Why You Should Call Waitz & Downer
A wise man once said, “A measured paranoia is a vital survival skill.” Death is the worst-case scenario, and you can’t know all the bad things that might happen. That’s the job of your wills and estate planning attorney — that’s our job at Waitz & Downer in Houma, Baton Rouge, Lafayette and Thibodaux. We have your back.
