Chapter 13 Finalizing Your Estate Plan

• Library: Estate Planning Basics (Nolo) (2024 Ed.)

CHAPTER 13 Finalizing Your Estate Plan

Storing Your Documents

Sharing Your Documents

Revising Your Documents

Once you've decided on your estate plan and finalized the documents you want, are you all done? Basically, yes—except for storing your documents, sharing them with others (mostly optional), and possibly making any subsequent changes you decide are necessary. Here's a commonsense approach to storing your documents, and some basic rules about when and how to make changes to your plans.

Storing Your Documents

Finishing your estate plan means that you have created some important documents: a health care directive, a durable power of attorney for finances, a will, maybe a living trust or transfer on death deed, and possibly others, ranging from pay-on-death accounts to revised business-ownership papers. Obviously, you need to keep all these documents in a safe place, where you and your executor, successor trustee, and attorney-in-fact can readily find them. Any secure place can be used for storage: a safe in your house or office, or a drawer in your home desk or file cabinet. Using a bank safe-deposit box is probably overcautious, and possibly burdensome. Your executor may not have access to the box after your death, and there's a chance the box will be sealed if your estate owes state estate tax. In any case, the major worry with estate planning documents isn't that they'll be stolen (they have no street value, after all) but that they'll be lost. Here's what matters:

• Use a secure place in your home or office to store the documents.
• As a backup, make scans or take photos of your documents and store them where you store your other important digital documents.
• Tell those responsible for implementing

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