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What Steps Are Needed to Legally Secure My Assets for My Heirs in Austin?
In order to ensure that all your assets pass on to your heirs, it’s always best to work with an estate planning attorney here in Austin who understands probate law and what the local courts are looking for. An estate attorney can ensure that all the details of your final wishes are properly laid out so that everything will go according to plan.
What Steps Are Needed to Legally Secure My Assets for My Heirs in Austin?
Draft a Will
Your will is the most important foundational document in your estate planning. It must be written, and while it’s valid if it’s handwritten, it’s always wiser to ensure that it is typed out. Handwritten wills are technically valid but are more easily challenged in court. Your will must be signed by you or by your authorized representative and must be witnessed by two credible witnesses who are not beneficiaries of your estate and who are over the age of 14.
Your will can name an executor to manage the distribution of your estate and include specific requests if you have items you want to go particularly to one beneficiary or another. To ensure that your will is executed smoothly, and particularly if you have a more complex estate, it’s always wise to provide an affidavit that has been notarized by witnesses in order to streamline probate. You’ll also want to update your will after every major life event, such as marriage, divorce, or the birth of a new child. Make sure that your will is stored in a safe and accessible place and that your executor and your estate planning attorney have copies.
Look Into Revocable Living Trusts
A revocable living trust allows you to manage assets during your lifetime and then transfer them to your heirs without going through probate. As the grantor, you transfer assets like real estate, bank accounts, and investments into the trust, name yourself the trustee, and designate a successor trustee to manage it upon your death or incapacity. Your successor trustee will likely be an attorney or one of your children.
You fund the trust by retitling assets your assets so they belong to the trust rather than to you personally. Trusts also offer privacy, unlike wills, which do become public during probate.
Designate Beneficiaries and Transfer-on-Death Provisions
If you have certain assets that don’t typically go through probate, such as life insurance or retirement accounts, it’s important that you designate beneficiaries for these directly. Texas also allows you to set up transfer-on-death (TOD) deeds for real property. This means your real estate would automatically become the property of a designated person upon your death, without any need for the real estate to go through the probate process.
You can also set up payable-on-death (POD) designations for bank accounts, which allows them to bypass probate. It is important to understand, however, that if your estate has significant debt or tax liabilities upon your death, that POD bank account accounts or TOD property may be used to pay these debts.
Minimize Estate Taxes
While Texas imposes no state estate or inheritance tax, federal estate taxes apply to all estates worth $13.61 million or more (an amount that is indexed to inflation and thus changes slightly every year). To reduce the size of your taxable estate, your lawyer can help you with various strategies. One strategy is to gift part of your estate each year. You are permitted to gift up to $18,000 per year, per person, without triggering a gift tax. If you have three children, for example, you could take $54,000 out of your estate every year and significantly reduce the taxable portion over the course of several years.
Another possibility is to set up an irrevocable trust. Irrevocable trusts remove assets entirely from your estate, though you do completely lose the authority to manage those assets once you set up the trust. For some estates, getting extra life insurance can be a valuable strategy. If much of your state is not liquid, a life insurance payout could enable your beneficiaries to pay required taxes on the estate without having to sell off assets.
Plan for Incapacity
Your estate plan should also include directives for what to do if you are incapacitated. A Durable Power of Attorney (POA) authorizes someone to manage your finances if you’re incapacitated, and a Medical Power of Attorney (MPOA) designates someone to make healthcare decisions on your behalf and in accordance with a Directive to Physicians, or living will, if you have one. A living will explains your preferences for whether you wish to have life-sustaining treatment or not, and to what extent.
You don’t have to have the same person acting as both POA and MPOA, and, in fact, it may be best to keep these separate. Whatever documents you come up with must be witnessed and notarized, and it’s important that you save the originals and provide copies to any healthcare provider who treats you. It’s also a good idea to review these documents every few years to make sure they still reflect your wishes.
Protect Business and Digital Assets
When you own a business, planning out the succession of that business after your death is a critical part of proper estate planning. If your business is a sole proprietorship, you can include the business in a trust or in your will and specify whether you want it to be dissolved, transferred to another person, or simply sold and the proceeds divided among your heirs or used to pay tax or debt liabilities. If you have an LLC partnership, you and your lawyer should review the operating agreements to see whether they address what to do in the event of your death.
Digital assets like email, social media accounts, or cryptocurrency require some special attention. Texas recognizes the Revised Uniform Fiduciary Access to Digital Assets Act, and this act allows your fiduciary to access your digital accounts unless you have specifically forbidden it. It’s important here to create a digital inventory with access instructions so that whoever comes after you will be able to deal with your digital assets according to your preferences. Your lawyer can help you understand how to go about this and help you set up passwords that will securely share your password credentials with the executor or trustee of your estate.
Communicate with Heirs and Executors
When someone passes away, there are many emotions involved, and adding complexity and confusion about how your estate is to be managed to the emotions everyone is already feeling is an unnecessary burden. Clear communication will prevent disputes and make sure that your wishes are understood and followed.
This is also an opportunity to tell family who you want to be executor of your estate and give them any detailed instructions, like the contact information of the lawyer who is holding your estate plans, the location of all your financial accounts, or to clarify how you want to distribute certain sentimental items.
To ensure that your assets go to your heirs intact and according to your wishes, contact Ford + Bergner LLP in Houston, Dallas, or Austin, TX today to set up a review of your estate.
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