An estate plan is not something you create once, place on a shelf, and assume will continue to work exactly as intended for the rest of your life. Life changes. Families change. Assets change. And the law changes. Your estate plan needs to keep pace.
That is why I encourage every client to make an annual estate planning checkup part of their routine—just as you would review your health, finances, insurance, or taxes.
Why review your estate plan every year?
You may not need to change your legal documents every year. But you should pause each year to ask whether the plan you created still fits the life you are living today.
Consider what may have changed since your documents were signed:
- Have there been births, deaths, marriages, divorces, or changes in family relationships?
- Are the people you named as agents, trustees, executors, guardians, or other fiduciaries still the right people—and are your successor choices still appropriate?
- Have you bought or sold real estate, opened or closed accounts, changed financial institutions, retired, sold a business, received an inheritance, or experienced another meaningful financial change?
- Do your beneficiary designations and account ownership still coordinate with your estate plan?
- Has your health, or the health of someone you love, changed in a way that makes incapacity or long-term care planning more important?
- Have your wishes about who should receive your property—or how they should receive it—changed?
- Have changes in federal or North Carolina law created opportunities or issues that did not exist when your plan was originally prepared?
North Carolina’s estate-planning landscape continues to evolve, and federal tax and retirement-account rules can change as well. A document that remains legally valid is not necessarily a document that remains optimal for your current circumstances and objectives.
A good plan should be maintained—not merely signed
Over the years, I have seen families discover during a crisis that an older plan no longer reflected the client’s wishes, that an important beneficiary designation had never been updated, that the people named to act were no longer available, or that newer planning opportunities had never been considered.
Those are difficult discoveries to make when someone has already become ill, incapacitated, or died.
The better time to find a problem is before it becomes a problem.
Think of your estate plan much like maintaining your home. The fact that the roof was installed years ago does not mean you will never inspect it again. Circumstances change. Documents age. Planning techniques evolve. What worked beautifully at one stage of life may need to be refreshed as your family, finances, health, goals, and the law evolve.
Your annual estate-planning checkup
Once a year, pull out your estate-planning documents and spend a few minutes reviewing the basics. Confirm your fiduciaries and successor fiduciaries. Review your beneficiaries. Look at how your assets are titled and whether beneficiary designations remain coordinated with your plan. Make sure your family knows where important documents and information can be found. And ask yourself one important question:
If something happened to me tomorrow, would this plan still accomplish what I want it to accomplish today?
If the answer is “I’m not sure,” that is reason enough to have the plan reviewed.
An annual checkup does not mean an annual overhaul. Sometimes the result of a review is simply reassurance that everything remains appropriate. Other times, a relatively small refresh can prevent a much larger problem later. And periodically, a more comprehensive legal review may be warranted because life or the law has materially changed.
Please do not wait for a crisis
The best estate planning is done while you have the time, health, capacity, and freedom to consider your options thoughtfully. Waiting until a hospitalization, diagnosis, family emergency, or other crisis can substantially limit the choices available to you.
Our goal has never been simply to help you have documents. It is to help you maintain a plan that actually works for your life, protects the people you love, and gives you confidence about the future.
If it has been a while since you reviewed your plan—or if anything meaningful has changed in your life since we last worked together—please contact our office to schedule an estate-plan review. We would be pleased to help you determine whether your plan remains current or whether updates, revisions, or a thoughtful refresh would better serve you now.
Your life does not stand still. Your estate plan should not either.
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