Chapter 13 Finalizing Your Estate Plan

• Library: Estate Planning Basics (Nolo) (2022 Ed.)

CHAPTER 13: Finalizing Your Estate Plan

Storing Your Estate Planning Documents

Revising Your Estate Plan

Once you've decided on your estate plan and finalized the documents you want, are you all done? Basically, yes—except (ah, the eternal "except")—except for storing your documents and 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 Estate Planning 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, probably a living trust, 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. This should be easy to accomplish. 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.
• Tell those responsible for implementing your estate planning (the executor of your will, the successor trustee(s) of your living trust, your agents for

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