Jeff Fouts: “Estate planning attorney Jeff Fouts here. Some people think that estate planning is very simplistic. It potentially can be, but it can also be a trap for the unwary. Let me explain.
Most people say, ‘Well, Jeff, you know, all it is I’m just leaving everything to my wife and everything equally to my children.’ Yes, that’s all very well and good, but there’s a number of different problems. One of the problems is that 65 percent of all people in America don’t have an estate plan. They don’t have an estate plan at all, of any kind.
You might ask, ‘Wow, why is that?’ One of the reasons they don’t have an estate plan is because they keep putting it on the back burner. They say to themselves, ‘You know, Jeff, I’m not incapacitated or dead now, so I don’t guess I need an estate plan.’ That’s the way it works.
I knew a gentleman that didn’t have an estate plan. He said he wanted one. He was kind of a hard-driving fellow, and it took us a good while to get the information we needed from him. Then, finally, when we did get it, guess what he told us? ‘Well, what’s taking you so long?’
It wasn’t actually us that was taking so long, it was his procrastination. That person wouldn’t ever want to schedule a signing meeting. They let life get in the way, and so this person had a heart attack.
The reality is that you can wait too long. You can put it off. This is a very, very serious consideration in the estate planning world. Procrastination can make it so that you’re too late to prepare an estate plan.”
