Sun City Estate Planning Blog

If you're a reader of this blog, then you likely know that there are many estate planning options available to you. You can utilize a will, a trust, a power of attorney, a health care directive, or some combination of these tools. What is important is that you pursue whatever planning strategy suits your needs, as well as the needs of your estate and your loved ones. This isn't always easy to determine, though.

Most Arizonans do know that they want to leave their home to a loved one or jointly to multiple loved ones. While this may be accomplished through a trust or a will, there is a particular type of trust that may be attractive to those who find themselves in this position. The qualified personal residence trust allows a homeowner to transfer title of a residence to another individual, or a trust, while retaining the ability to reside in the home. The biggest benefit of this type of trust is that transfer taxes can be reduced because they will be based on the value of the home at the time that the home is transferred to the other individual or the trust, rather than the likely increased value of the home when the homeowner passes away.

Competent estate planning is one of the best ways to ensure that you can provide for your loved one's after your death. This may mean setting up something basic like a will and revocable trust, or it may require more extensive documentation to ensure that all assets, identified heirs and beneficiaries, and situations are accounted for. This can be a challenging task to address, which is why it is advisable that you seek out legal assistance to develop your plan.

One matter an attorney can help address is the future care of a child with special needs. Arizonans who have special needs children often worry about how those children will get by without their financial and emotional support. It's a difficult issue to address, but through the utilization of a special needs trust you better maximize the resources that your children will have at their disposal.

Many Arizonans think of wills as simple documents they can utilize to dictate how their assets will be distributed upon their death. While this is true in a broad context, these estate planning vehicles can be quite detailed, and they are automatically legally valid. Instead, estate planners need to be careful to ensure that their wills are abiding by applicable laws unless they want to risk their assets falling into the wrong hands.

So, what are the requirements in Arizona for a legally valid will? To start, the individual who is creating the will or having the will created for him or her must be at least 18 years old. Next, that individual must be of sound mind. This means that the state of one's mental health must be taken into consideration before pursuing a will. If an individual is deemed incompetent to create a will, then additional steps may need to be taken to ensure that a holistic estate plan is in place and legally valid.

One of the greatest benefits of estate planning is the fact that it is a custom-tailored process that can be modified to suit your needs. Although many find great relief in the number of options available to them, others find the matter completely overwhelming. They don't know where to start when it comes to estate planning, and their fear of making a mistake paralyzes them into inaction. While the stress and fear of what may appear to be an enormous undertaking is understandable, the truth of the matter is that estate planning doesn't have to be difficult.

With the guidance of an experienced attorney, Arizonans can identify the estate planning vehicles they want to utilize to help them achieve their asset distribution goals. For example, if you want to leave some money to a nephew but only under certain circumstances, such as his graduation from college, then an attorney can help you create a trust that imposes that condition on the release to trust funds. If, as we discussed previously on the blog, you want to make sure that your children from a previous marriage receive their fair share of your assets, then you might want to utilize another type of trust with different provisions.