A Plan to Start Your Estate Plan
By Alan D. Feller, Esq
My mother’s mother, also affectionately known as my Oma, was German to her core. How this played out will be familiar to her cultural brethren. She walked……a lot. Oma lived in a neighborhood in upper Manhattan that was populated with multitudes of her countrymen and women, who all apparently knew her. Every walk with her was interrupted by a “stop and chat”. After 20 blocks of hearing, “Oh, Frau fill-in-the-blank” I got pretty tired, especially since the grocery store was only 3 blocks away and I had been promised a chocolate bar.
This type of meandering will be familiar to Estate Planning and Elder Law Attorneys who have waited patiently for a client to get started with their planning. All types of excuses, intervening vacation plans, holidays and car trouble seem to get in the way. I get it. Shopping for pants is preferable to sitting in a room and contemplating a future without yourself.
Luckily, technology has made getting started so much easier. Many law firms can be contacted by phone, email, text or a simple website click to set-up an appointment. The consultations are held in person, by phone, or by Zoom. You can sit at your dining room table, surrounded by placemats and begin your planning. Initial consultations are usually just conversations, not requiring you to gather documentation. From these conversations, the outlines of a plan are formed – with the specifics laid out during the next meeting (called a “Design” meeting). Following the “Design” meeting, document drafts are created and made ready for the signing date. Your estate plan is then ready to go.
Why bother planning? Well….you like your house. Thirty years of working and saving to pay off the mortgage was no picnic. Mommy’s tomato garden produced the juiciest beefsteaks you have ever seen. Daddy’s workshop in the garage held the tools that rebuilt his 1965 Plymouth Belvedere. If one or both spouses require Medicaid long term care services (a distinct possibility) and the house falls into that recipient’s Probate Estate, then New York State can swoop in and file an estate claim. Goodbye equity. Hello weakened family.
Oh, just let the kids figure it out. Here is the thing. Your children get along fairly well, now. But if you are sick and your care falls on one child and the finances are a mess – the relationships may fray. After you are gone and no planning was done, they may have to front their own funds to begin the estate process. Once again, relationships disintegrate and the family breaks apart.
We can avoid all of these issues with a single click. Getting started means committing to do things correctly. Contact the professionals at The Feller Group, P.C. today. We are a click, a call, an email, and a text away.
Alan D. Feller, Esq. is managing partner of The Feller Group, a law firm dedicated to the practice of elder law and estate planning, located at 625 Route 6 in Mahopac. He can be reached at afeller@thefellergroup.com.
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