The plan for you: we ask the experts about estate-plan basics in various life stages.

• Author: McKimmie, Kathy
• Position: Estate Planning

PLANNING FOR THE LIFE stage you're in--single or married, with small children or grown, wealthy or just comfortable, passing on a business or wanting to leave it all to a charity--that's where your financial advisors come in. They'll make sure your wealth is handled in the manner you wish and, of course, ensure that you give as little as possible to the tax man.

A will is the indisputable and indispensable first order of business for estate planners, regardless of assets. "Get a will. Have a professional do it, and keep it up to date and current with life changes," urges Charles Mosbrucker, trust officer with Community Trust & Investments in Noblesville.

Even if you're married, without a will some of the property in your name alone could go to your parents, says Bob Rountree, vice president and senior trust officer with 1st Source Bank in South Bend.

If there's no will and there are children, if a spouse dies and has an individual brokerage account, for example, under state law half the assets will go to the surviving spouse and half to the children, says R.J. McConnell, partner at Bose McKinney & Evans, an Indianapolis law firm.

"The children may be 2, 4 and 6, and with no planning, a guardianship would be set up until adulthood," McConnell says. The children would receive their money at age 18, he says, when they may be unable to manage it properly, and the surviving spouse is without full use of the money needed to raise the children.

A good basic plan for a young married couple, he says, is for assets to be left to the spouse, with a provision for who will have custody of the children and at what ages the children will receive assets from a trust if both parents are gone. Typically that would be one-third at ages 25, 30 and 35.

Protecting wealth. Early in a marriage with children, term life insurance of $1 million to $2 million on the principal breadwinner is an affordable way to protect the future of the surviving spouse and children, says Todd Glass, partner with Free & Hatfield, a law firm in Evansville. It could be placed in a revocable life insurance trust to provide for the surviving spouse, who is probably the trustee.

"But if something happened, it would be distributed to the kids in chunks," he says. Mom and Dad can change the beneficiaries, he says, and can decide to delay a prodigal child's inheritance. "Most estate-planning tools are revocable. The more complex is the irrevocable trust. It's for a later stage, with more mature clients and greater wealth."

For those with inherited wealth, planning may start even before marriage with a prenuptial agreement, says Lisa Stone, partner...