Estate planning

[sandrark]

If you know what you want as far as who gets what, then it's useless to get a lawyer that would love to drag it out and taxes the top. Just keep it simple and let your spouse and kids get everything, evenly divided, or give them a option to negiotiate among themselves. For example, if you have 2 kids and one of them want to keep the vacation house then he should have an option of compensating the other sibling for the other half or they can have joint ownership with joint financial responsibility to keep it in good shape. If you bring a lawyer into it, you'll be seeing fees to sell it, process money/proceed, and more.

Whatever you do, don't give money to charities or friends or even a relative in your will. If your family see fit, they'll give to them but don't drag an outsider into the mess. Spouse, kids, and siblings are the only people who should get your money.

I could not disagree more.

I had a friend with cancer, never married and no kids - and all of her family lived across the country. For nearly a year, her local friends took care of her, took her to chemo, bought her groceries, cleaned her house, held her hand, paid her bills, lined up legal advice, visited her in the hospital through multiple surgeries....And her family came out to visit her only after I told them that she'd rather see them while she was still alive to hug them, instead of them posturing at her funeral.

She had not spoken to her mother lovingly in years - her mother was a bitter, nasty, unhappy woman.

My friend chose to leave her life insurance to her two nieces and a nephew, with small bequests to myself and the other friend to acknowledge what we'd happily done.

That was HER choice, and HER estate.

A blanket statement that ONLY her kids, siblings and family should be honored in her will? Well, you don't understand that sometimes, you have to CHOOSE your family, because the one you were born with might not measure up.