Our San Diego County Estate Planning Lawyer Can Help You Avoid These Five Risks of DIY Wills
Plugging your information into a template or app may spit out a generic document, but that isn’t really estate planning. What makes estate planning valuable isn’t only the legal documents you produce through it but also the personalized advice your attorney can provide.
Mark Ignacio Law’s focus isn’t on producing documents but rather on providing holistic stewardship of our clients’ family legacies as well as their financial legacies. By listening intently to your family’s individual needs and goals and drawing upon our years of experience in estate planning, we can craft documents that are customized to perfectly reflect your wishes and support your family. With La Mesa estate planning lawyer Mark Ignacio guiding your way, estate planning is a much easier process than you might expect.
Five Dangers of DIY Estate Planning
DIY estate planning often promises simplicity, an easy process, and fast results. What the documents created with these tools and forms don’t deliver are the personalized strategies needed for proper estate planning.
The whole point of estate planning is planning for the future distribution of your assets after your death or incapacitation, yet DIY wills often set the stage for future problems. You aren’t doing your loved ones any favors by writing a DIY will that might only cause them more stress when the time comes to execute it.
1. DIY Estate Plans Limit Your Options
Most DIY estate plans revolve around wills. While every adult should have a will, these documents are far from the only tools needed for comprehensive estate planning. Wills also must be kept as simple as possible if you’re going to force them to fit into the boilerplate template used for DIY estate planning.
Essentially, when you choose do-it-yourself estate planning, you’re confining yourself to a few options that offer little potential for expressing more complex wishes or meeting more complex needs.
This is the preservation and passing along of your legacy through generations of your family that you’re considering. Don’t you want the best options to be available to you?
2. A DIY Will Might Not Be Valid
For your will and other estate planning documents to be valid under California law, they must meet certain requirements.
For example, a will must either be notarized or be signed by two witnesses not involved in your estate, according to the California Courts. If your DIY will fails to meet these requirements, or any other statutory or legal requirements, it could be found invalid. An invalid will is no better than if you had no written will at all.
3. Your Loved Ones Won’t Know Your DIY Will Isn’t Adequate Until It’s Too Late
If there are problems with your DIY estate planning documents, they’re unlikely to become apparent until it’s too late.
When you have a knowledgeable estate planning attorney like Mark Ignacio create a will for you, this professional can draw on their considerable legal experience to ensure its contents are clear, specific, valid, and reflective of your wishes.
DIY estate planning documents, on the other hand, are often vague, ambiguous, and confusing. They may fail to establish in writing what you actually want to happen to your assets upon your death.
The result is that parts of your DIY will and other estate planning documents may contradict each other, and your will could potentially be contested or found to be invalid.
Any mistakes in your estate plans could leave your loved ones without the care and resources they need. These difficult situations can give rise to squabbles that end up creating permanent rifts in your family.
This common consequence of DIY wills is not the legacy you want to leave.
4. DIY Estate Plans Don’t Save You as Much Money as You Think They Do
If the cost of hiring a lawyer is driving your interest in DIY estate planning, you should know that you may not be getting the great deal you think you are. DIY wills and estate plans may be cheap to create but could ultimately cost your beneficiaries far more than you would spend hiring an experienced attorney in the first place.
A comprehensive estate plan carefully constructed by a knowledgeable attorney is chosen for the benefits it offers in your unique circumstances. This may include plans that offer tax savings and take into account the effects of inheritance laws. Your DIY estate plan, based on a basic template, won’t be able to do this.
If your will gets contested or has to go to the probate court, your beneficiaries could be in for a costly, as well as lengthy, legal battle that could have been avoided if you’d only had professional guidance in your estate planning.
5. DIY Estate Plans Won’t Keep Up With Legal and Life Changes
Over time, both your life and the law can change in ways that may affect your estate plan.
Having a trusted estate plan attorney can help you keep your wills, trusts, and other documents up to date with legal changes and ensure, through regular reviews, that the current language of your documents reflects your wishes, even as family dynamics evolve. If you’re viewing estate planning as a one-time task you can cross off your to-do list by plugging information into a template or an app, there’s a good chance you aren’t prepared for the possibility of these changes.
An out-of-date will may be of little use to your family members when the time comes, causing only more stress and confusion during what’s already a difficult time.
Professional Estate Planning Services Are More Accessible Than You Think
What if you could get professional legal guidance for estate planning with less stress, less hassle, and a financial investment that’s more cost-effective in the long run than DIY tools and services?
At Mark Ignacio Law, we strive to make the cost of professional estate planning affordable by offering fixed-fee pricing. We never charge clients for answering questions or guiding them in the trust funding process. We invite all potential clients to take advantage of a free seminar that includes information on estate planning, a strategy session with licensed attorney Mark Ignacio, and a discount on selected plans we’re able to create for them.
With us to guide you, the process of planning for your family’s future doesn’t have to be overwhelming. Throughout the process, we’ll be respectful of your time as well as your unique needs and wishes for your estate plan.
As a faith-based attorney, Mark Ignacio takes seriously the duty of Christian stewardship to shepherd you toward the right path for transforming your time, talent, and treasure into a legacy that will live on to support and protect your family. Our firm promises clients a unique, personal experience they will not get with any other law firm (and definitely not from DIY document-producing tools).
Client Jennifer Gavin said, “Mark made it easy and painless to set up our family trust. He explained everything in easy to understand terms and was easy to contact with questions and clarifications as we navigated the process.”
Ferdinand Rubio said Mark and his team “made a very complicated process understandable. The package is very comprehensive yet easy to digest.”
Before hiring Mark Ignacio Law, Oliver O. said, “Spouse and I spent years indecisively looking for an Estate Attorney. It was important for us to find a great lawyer with an equally competent staff.” With the Mark Ignacio Law team, he said, “The entire process of creating a Trust & Will was smooth and easy.”
To learn more about how we’ve helped people just like you with their estate planning concerns, check our testimonials and our five-star Google reviews from past clients.