I have seen a few instances where clients have brought in their old “estate planning” documents that they have attempted to do themselves. Time and time again they are wrought with problems. Both the client and I are grateful that we were able to put a professional plan in place before anything happened and those documents would be tested.
A colleague down in Florida (read his blog here) has worked on a case where unfortunatly, an individual attempted a do it yourself approach and ended up costing his intended beneficiaires nearly $75,000.
That $50, internet form doesn’t seem so cheap when it costs $75,000 to your beneficiaries on the back end.
July 25th, 2008 at 11:17 am
[...] Do It Yourself Estate Planning Gone Horribly WrongI have seen a few instances where clients have brought in their old “estate planning” documents that they have attempted to do themselves. Time and time again they are wrought with problems. Both the client and I are grateful that we … [...]
August 3rd, 2008 at 3:41 pm
I have also seen examples where clients have walked in with forms pulled from the internet or sometimes they have their parents documents and decided they could just do their own based on their parents. The fact that their parents will is from the 60’s and the law has changed ten times over never seems to cross their mind. These are accidents waiting to happen. E Green. http://taxchatter.wordpress.com