This holiday season, as people recognize an opportunity to interact with family members and friends they don’t see in person often, it could be a time to discuss estate planning.
While that’s a topic that can be emotionally charged — a recent Trust & Will survey found that about 40% of families have fights during holiday gatherings and that one-third of these issues can lead to lasting breaks in the family network — the priority remains to keep families and friendships intact.
Here are six tips to keep the conversation heading in a positive direction.
1. Use the Past to Discuss the Future
Estate planning doesn’t need to be brought up in a stale, sanitized way to discuss assets and trustees. Our ancestors gave us clues to navigating these challenging conversations in how they did or didn’t handle their end-of-life affairs.
Al Faber, of Woodson Wealth Management, encourages people to lean on their legacies as a way to introduce the estate planning process. After all, recalling fond memories of Uncle Mike’s favorite ways to tease his nieces and nephews is a more pleasant and casual way to discuss a loved one who has passed and thereby broaching death.
2. Now Is Better Than Never
When a person passes away, the estate goes into probate to pay off outstanding debts, examine the deceased’s assets and determine where those should go. If a person has not created a will, the probate process can be quite lengthy.
Some people avoid creating a will because they feel that having a conversation with their loved ones is good enough. As recent commercials demonstrate, saying it out loud doesn’t make it legal. So, financial advisors and estate attorneys urge people to create a real will, trust or other documents to ensure that their final wishes are followed to the extent they can be.
LexisNexis has found that 55% of Americans don’t have a will. Two-thirds of Americans don’t have any form of estate plan, according to Trust & Will data. For a will to be a truly legal document, it needs to abide by the laws of the state in which it was drafted and the person who is creating the will must have intent and the mental capacity to be able to complete the exercise.
To ensure that estate planning conversations happen while all relevant parties are available to discuss them, Faber suggests keeping any conversations “light” rather than coming across as “preachy.”
Garrett Harper, founder of Harper Financial Strategies, notes that it’s better to go through the potentially scary estate planning conversation with family members while you’re alive so they understand your thought process. This level of understanding can help people be at peace with a loved one’s decision because it doesn’t seem random or thoughtless.
