Dear Estate Planning for Life™ members:
This is the time of the year that Tammy, Mitch, Shelly and I are anxiously awaiting the return of Estate Planning Review Worksheets (EPRWs) from those of you who are scheduled to update your estate planning documents this year. On July 15th, we mailed out packets to 154 members of our Estate Planners for Life™ Program that contained an instructional cover letter, a summary of your current plan with instructions on how to request changes, and a registration form for one of our six Client Update Programs (CUPs) which begin in late August and continue throughout the month of September. The Client Update Program is the cornerstone of our formal maintenance and update program. It is the process which allows us to work together to make sure you documents reflect your current wishes and incorporate any recent changes in your life, the law, and our learning!
For those of you who have not participated in this process, let me briefly describe how it works. We send you an EPRW. You complete and return it by August 11th and reserve a meeting date and time. These meetings are group meetings that are effectively and efficiently designed to ensure that you have an estate plan that really works and allows us to keep our renewal fees in our program as low as possible. Upon return of your EPRW, we pull and review your file. We then draft a restatement of your trust and other planning documents, that not only includes your requested changes but our recommended changes to the language of your trust and other documents based upon recent changes in the law. On the day of your meeting, you show up with your Red Books, leave them with one of our team members at the front door, and go in our large conference room to execute new signature pages and learn about all the recent improvements in your planning documents. After an hour or so, your Red Books are returned and you get to go home with the peace of mind that your estate plan is up to date!
Please keep in mind that even if you do not have any personal changes in your trustees, guardians, helpers, etc. it is critical that you participate in this program. For example, over the past couple of years we have inserted language in our trust to reduce future potential capital gain and income taxes for your beneficiaries. We look forward to receiving your worksheets and seeing you at one of our meetings this fall!
Marty Cain