Haunted houses are not the only thing that can be downright terrifying, give you a shock, and make it hard for you to sleep at night. A poorly made or forgotten-about estate plan can leave your loved ones vulnerable to hauntings of the financial kind.
I wasn’t thinking about the emotional aspects (which I’d selfishly like to assume would be devastating) or even the long-term financial stuff (we’ve taken care of our life insurance needs and periodically update our estate plan). Instead, I was thinking about the day-to-day practical things, like the physical act of paying our bills and our mortgage.
While both men and women should have a plan in place for aging, the statistics particularly demand a female’s attention. According to the American Association for Long Term Care Insurance, more than 70% of nursing home residents are women. Add to that the 4.7 million women who used an in-home nurse aid just last year.
Consequently, we encourage our clients to think about their investments as a means to an end (or as Greene puts it, “Connecting investing to what it can accomplish”) and to gauge how well they are doing by seeing if they are still on track to accomplish their goals. In the end, that’s the only benchmark that truly matters.
It is understandable and reasonable that some parents do not want their children to know what their bank account balance is or how their portfolio looks. However, surprises that reveal themselves in Wills and beneficiary designations (for those assets that transfer outside the Will) can cause a family rift.
However, experiencing a life event is not a prerequisite for creating or updating an estate plan. If it has been a while since you last updated your estate planning documents (like Wills or Power of Attorney), your account beneficiaries, and how your accounts are titled, it would be a good time to check your plan too.