Marshal Your Financial Information to Ease Administration of Your Estate

Our estate attorneys frequently receive calls from clients who want to organize their parent’s estate. As they acknowledge their parent’s aging, they want to understand how they can strategize in advance to ease its administration in the future.

Unfortunately, our estate attorneys also frequently encounter clients who are confronting the death of a parent. These clients are left to untangle and sleuth out their parent’s assets while administering an estate or a trust.

As we settle into the new year, we encourage you to add centralizing your assets to your new year’s resolutions. While you are at it, work with your aging parents or loved ones to help them do the same.

Centralize Your Assets

When a person dies, someone is in charge of administering their estate or trust. This person will have the task of marshaling assets and preparing tax returns. If you centralize your assets, the person will have an easier time ensuring the proper administration of your estate. But what information might that person need? Here are the assets you should centralize:

1. A listing of assets, broken out by type (i.e., bank account, insurance policy, retirement account, brokerage account, real estate);
2. For each asset, titling of the asset (i.e., in my sole name, jointly with another, titled in trust); and,
3. For each asset, information about any designated pay-on-death or transfer-on-death beneficiary.

Now is the Perfect Time to Get Organized

January and February is the perfect time of year for you or a loved one to centralize your assets.  Why?  This time of year, 1099s are issued from the custodian of each of your bank, investment, and retirement accounts. As you receive 1099s, naturally you will collect them so that you or your accountant can prepare your taxes.  Take a few minutes, sit down with each 1099, and begin making your list.

Remember to update your list on a regular basis, at least annually, to reflect any changes in ownership or beneficiary designation.

Encourage Family to Do the Same

Ask your parents or other aging loved ones if they have created such a list.  You can explain that this is not out of an attempt to invade their financial privacy or liberty, but simply out of care to ensure uninterrupted access to their assets should they become incapacitated.

Keep the list someplace secure—we recommend with the original estate planning documents.

Taking a few minutes to create this list will ultimately save your loved ones many hours of aggravation and potentially many thousands of dollars in legal fees in untangling your financial affairs after your death.

For more information about probate and trust administration, and how to make life easier for your loved ones, contact Jeremy Rachlin at (301) 656-1177 or jrachlin@bulmandunie.com.