The Gift You Give Your Family Before You’re Gone

Whether you are just starting your career, raising a family, or approaching retirement, there is one thing every person has in common: you already have an estate plan. The question is not whether you have one. It is whether you designed it yourself or whether the state designed it for you.

At its core, estate planning is the coordination of your affairs when you are no longer able to act on your own behalf. It goes beyond just a series of documents. It centers around the people you care about most, yet it is easy to become so focused on the documents that you forget about the people. The documents are simply the vehicle. The people are the destination.

Here’s What You Need to Know
Every estate plan has two jobs: protecting your assets and protecting you. Let’s look at both.

Before an attorney drafts a single document, they need answers. We ask the same questions with every client, starting with assets and working toward personal and healthcare decisions. Here’s a preview of what’s coming:

• Whom do you want to have your life savings?
• How do you want to leave it to them?
• Whom do you want to serve in key estate and trust roles?
• Whom do you want to handle your financial and healthcare affairs while you’re alive?
• Are there any family circumstances that we need to plan for?

Your answers to these questions shape the entire plan. The documents come last — they are simply the mechanism that turns your intentions into action.

The Core Estate Planning Documents
Estate planning is a series of documents that work together to carry out your plan. The right combination depends on your specific situation, the state you live in, and your desired outcomes.

1. Last Will and Testament: Directs how your assets are distributed after death and names a guardian for minor children. Important caveat: a will only controls assets that are not already titled in a trust or covered by a beneficiary designation. Unlike those options, a will requires court approval — known as probate — to transfer assets to your heirs.
2. Revocable Living Trusts: Provides potential benefits like managing assets during your lifetime, avoiding probate, and controlling how and when heirs receive money.
3. Beneficiary Designations: Passes assets directly to your heirs, avoiding probate. Life insurance, IRAs, 401(k)s, annuities, and transfer-on-death accounts pass directly to whoever is named, regardless of what your will says.
4. Power of Attorney: Designates someone to manage your financial affairs if you become incapacitated. Without one, even a spouse may need court approval to act on your behalf.
5. Healthcare Power of Attorney: Names someone to make medical decisions on your behalf when you cannot make them yourself. In some cases, this can be combined with the Power of Attorney into one document.
6. Living Will / Healthcare Directive: Documents your wishes for medical treatment if you are in a terminal condition and cannot communicate. It answers the hardest questions before anyone has to ask them in a hospital hallway.
7. POLST (Physician's Order for Life-Sustaining Treatment): Creates a physician-signed medical order that gives healthcare providers specific, immediately actionable instructions about your care. Unlike a Living Will, a POLST is actionable immediately and travels with you across care settings.

What Can Go Wrong?

Estate plans have many moving parts, and there are several avoidable mistakes we often see. The most common include:

1. Outdated Beneficiary Forms: These should be reviewed on an ongoing basis to avoid unintended outcomes. For example, after divorces, it is common for an ex-spouse to remain listed as a beneficiary. If not updated, the ex-spouse would inherit that account.
2. No Estate Documents: When there is no plan, the state steps in with one of its own. The state’s plan does not know your family, does not know your wishes, and does not care about either. It decides where your money goes and who raises your children.
3. Outdated Documents: An estate plan written twenty years ago may name people in key roles who are no longer living and may distribute assets in a way that no longer reflects your wishes.
4. Incorrectly Titled Assets. When a trust is drafted, your assets must be retitled in the trust’s name. A failure to do that negates the benefit of the trust.

Why Estate Planning Is Never Finished

Signing documents is a starting point, not a finish line. Your plan should be reviewed every three to five years or after a major life event such as birth, marriage, divorce, or death. The goal is a living plan that reflects who you are today, not who you were when you signed it.

What to Do Next

If you already have an estate plan, the single most valuable thing you can do today is review it. If you don’t have one in place, now is a great time to start. In either case, your Apella advisor is the right place to begin that conversation. We work alongside your attorney to make sure your documents, accounts, and beneficiary designations are all coordinated, current, and built around your actual life, not a generic template written for someone else’s family.

Apella Capital, LLC (“Apella”), DBA Apella Wealth, is an investment advisory firm registered with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The firm only transacts business in states where it is properly registered or excluded or exempt from registration requirements. Registration of an investment adviser does not imply any specific level of skill or training and does not constitute an endorsement of the firm by the Commission. Apella Wealth provides this communication as a matter of general information. Any data or statistics quoted are from sources believed to be reliable but cannot be guaranteed or warranted.