Estate Planning Protects Your Family
When you are making financial plans throughout your life you have every expectation of benefiting from the result of these plans. And if you are to make any mistakes along the way, you would be the one to suffer in the near-term and you’d be around to correct these mistakes and right the ship going forward. Estate planning is a unique exercise in this regard because the ultimate result of the plan is something that you will not participate in; you engage in it for the benefit of your family.
This is something that is very important to keep in mind if you’re the type of person who is prone to procrastination. Few of us would be willing to take any types of risks with the well-being of our families at stake, but people routinely go through life without having an estate plan in place. There are a number of reasons for this, and perhaps the most common one would be the notion that there will be plenty of time for “that sort of thing” later when you are well into your twilight years.
This is misguided reasoning because you never know which day is going to be your last and life does not carry any guarantees. Plus, this is not something that most people want to consider but decreased mental faculties are a very real possibility once you reach an advanced age.
Somewhere in the vicinity of half of people who have reached the age of 85 are suffering from dementia and some 40% of them have Alzheimer’s disease. So if you think you can put off planning your estate until the bitter end, the fact is that you may reach the point where you’re not of sound mind and unable to do so.
The bottom line is that estate planning is one of the base responsibilities of adulthood, and if you choose to shirk this responsibility you are putting those that you love the most in a very precarious situation. You never know what the future holds, so if you do not have an estate plan in place today is the day to contact an experienced estate planning attorney to take action to protect your family come what may.
