In estate matters, it’s a good rule of thumb to review your estate plan every three years or whenever there is a major change in your life – a marriage, a divorce, a remarriage, the birth of children, the loss of an immediate family member or a major rise or fall of assets. Creating an estate plan is a very personal matter; the estate planning party usually consists of you, your partner and your attorney.
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Although you may consider and provide for your extended family, they are not often a part of the planning process itself. For individuals or couples with elderly parents and/or young kids starting out on their own, it might be smart to do a multi-generational estate check up at the same time you review your own estate planning. Planning as an extended family has its time and place. Here are some other specific situations in which families might want to consider multi-generational estate planning:
- Planning for succession within a family business;
- When multiple generations of families own property together or when there is a particular property that the family has treasured for some time like a farm or summer home;
- If the family is responsible for significant debt;
- If a family has a history of supporting certain charitable foundations and desires to continue doing so;
- To provide for family members who live out of the country;
- To make provisions for a non-traditional family situation, such as unmarried partners;
Planning with your extended family doesn’t necessarily mean you won’t be able to create a private plan for you and your spouse as well. You must be willing to share your plans with other family members, however, and that is not always a comfortable concept. It is quite possible to create individual estate plans for each nuclear family while still respecting the decisions that the extended family made together. Of course, this process will be made much easier if the extended family and each nuclear family works with the same attorney, but it is certainly not necessary so long as each attorney and family is willing to communicate and act together.
