Ok so let’s talk for a couple of minutes about estate planning. It’s one of the main areas of law we practice here Morris Law Group, and I’m certified specialists in trusts and estates. The main idea behind estate planning is really very simple. It is to make sure that your stuff goes where you wanted to go as quickly and cheaply as possible after you’re gone. When you look at estate planning, you have 3 options. Your first is the option that most people choose, unfortunately, which is to do nothing.
About 60 percent of people who passed away in the state of California do so without having any estate plan at all. We always tell clients is if you don’t have a plan, the state has a plan for you and they call that plan the intestacy laws. The idea behind the intestacy laws is that it’s a default set of rules what the state things you’d want have happened with your stuff after you’re gone and they’re pretty straightforward. If you’re a married couple and everything you own is community property then when when they pass away the community property going over to the surviving spouse. If there’s no surviving spouse it’s going to go down to the kids. If there are no kids, that’s where things start to get a bit goofy so the intestacy laws serve as a backstop.
The second option is to do a will. Now the easiest way to look at a will is that a will is a set of instructions. A will allows you to make a customized plan for what you’d like to have happen with your stuff. It lets you opt out of the intestacy regime. It lets you put conditions on gifts. Let’s say you didn’t want to leave to your children. Maybe you want to give something to your church or to a charity or your parents or a friend. There’s not really any provisions for those kinds of things in the intestacy laws but in a will you can make provisions for all of those kinds of things.
