Benefits of The eState Plan - for you and your family
by: Cory Carlton
If you’re reading this, then you are considering taking a step in the right direction of doing some estate planning for your family. Bravo!
The eState Plan is unlike any other legal planning process that you may find, and I want to lay it out for you and share with you some of the things that our clients love most about it.
First, we’re using a trust. Not a will. Wills do the bare minimum and have limitations and flaws that could hurt your family. If you need further details as to what those are you can check out this article, we wrote last year: Why You Don’t Want A Will.
The next aspect of The eState Plan, and perhaps what our clients love the most about it the fact that it is all online. It’s a digital trust.
That means it can be updated at ANY TIME.
If you work with a local attorney, the odds are that they are going to have a paper trust generated for you. These things are thick. Tons and tons of pages and the issue with these kinds of trust is they are difficult to get changed.
If you have a traditional trust you have to contact your attorney, if you can get a hold of them, let them know the changes you want to be made, approve the changes, then get things signed and notarized, then pay the hefty hourly fee for something you could have done in 20 seconds if you had the ability.
That’s what our online trust gives you. Complete control of your estate. Making an update in a matter of seconds, for free.
Besides complete control, which our clients love, you must consider that if you work with an attorney and they draft you a paper trust and that attorney retires, you need a new attorney to service your trust. Good luck. You won’t find one. Attorneys don’t want to take the time to read some other attorney’s trust and then do updates here and there. They will just tell you to get a new trust because they want to collect the upfront trust fee.
With a digital trust, that’s not the case. There is a team of attorneys that can service your needs and of course, you can make all changes.
I mentioned attorneys charging a fee and these can vary depending on the attorney. Generally, if the fee is smaller then they will charge you a fee to make any updates. If the fee is larger, they will give you free updates but have factored those into the initial cost giving the “appearance” of free updates.
Our trust fee is $2,495 and then there is an annual fee of $95 which gives you the online access to make all the updates and changes you want.
So, you know that we’re using a trust, that it’s online, and what the fee is. Now for the process.
First, we have a conversation to answer all your questions about trusts and determine if a trust is right for you. In most situations, a trust is going to be a good idea. If you have no family and are leaving everything to one person you may not need one but I will go out on a limb and say odds are you could benefit from one.
If we decide a trust is a good fit for you we do an intake call.
On this call, we get your payment information, contact details, primary beneficiaries, and payment for the trust. From there we hop on a zoom call where we walk you through using the online portal, so you know where to go and what to do first.
During this call, we focus on showing you how to fund your trust. That is just our terminology for listing your assets in the trust.
Lots of attorneys will tell you to change ownership of your assets to the trust but that is not required if you don’t want to do that. We can discuss that one-on-one.
After you have your assets listed in the ledger, we ensure you know where to complete your medical directives.
Once these two items are completed we schedule a call with one of the attorneys to help make sure everything is in legal order and we esign your trust.
This is the step where we make sure everything is being left to the people you want and how you want it.
The last call in this series is the proof of funding call where we get back on a call with you to review what you have done and make sure everything is in order and helping you achieve your goals.
After we walk you through these calls it should only take you about 90 minutes to complete your estate plan.
This process makes planning your estate so simple.
After that, when you need to make changes, you can log into the system and make the changes you want.
We’ll review your trust with you every year to make sure everything is up to date.
What our clients love most about The eState Plan is the complete control they have over their estate.
This is the system I use to protect my wife and four children.
This is the system the president of our company uses for his blended family and their 10 children and fast-growing grandchildren.
We have helped everyone from young individuals and couples all the way to people in their 80s and 90s take care of their estate planning needs.
If you would like to schedule a call with me to ask you specific questions and see if a trust will make sense for you and your family, CLICK HERE to schedule a call.