If you are married, you undoubtedly want to protect your spouse in every way possible. Fortunately, your estate plan offers a wide variety of opportunities for you to do just that. In fact, a carefully drafted estate plan can protect your spouse from unnecessary litigation, from making difficult decisions, and from financial hardship. To help explain, the attorneys at Legacy Care Law Firm discuss how to protect your spouse using your estate plan.
How Your Estate Plan Can Protect Your Spouse from Financial Hardship
The most basic estate plan allows you to decide what happens to your estate assets upon your death. Without even a basic estate plan (consisting of a Last Will and Testament), you will leave behind an intestate estate. Leaving an intestate estate is akin to allowing the state to create an estate plan for you because the state intestate succession laws will govern the distribution of your estate assets.
If your surviving spouse is your sole survivor, meaning you are not survived by any descendants, your spouse will inherit your entire estate. A single living descendant complicates the intestate distribution of your estate assets. In addition, the lack of estate planning could mean your spouse has to wait months, even years, to receive the inheritance you left him/her. Moreover, a significant portion of your estate could be lost to estate taxes if you fail to create an estate plan that incorporates tax avoidance strategies.
The creation of an estate plan, however, can ensure that your spouse receives the entire inheritance you want him/her to have without the need to wait and without the value of that inheritance being diminished by taxes. Advanced estate planning tools and strategies can further protect assets from taxation, arrange for your spouse to receive regular distributions from a trust, and even ensure that the high cost of long-term care is covered if your spouse needs such care in the future.
How to Protect Your Spouse from Difficult Decision Making
If you could spare your spouse from the need to make difficult healthcare decisions, you would surely want to do so, right? Once again, your estate plan can achieve this goal. By incorporating an incapacity planning component into your estate plan that includes the execution of advance directives, you can make important medical decisions now so that your spouse is not forced to make them while he/she is not emotionally prepared to make them.
Executing a Living Will allows you to make serious, end-of-life medical decisions now. If you reach a point where your Living Will activates, your physicians and other healthcare providers will be legally obligated to honor the decisions you made in that document. For example, if you do not want to be kelp alive by the use of artificial hydration or nutrition or the use of machines, you can make that choice clear and legally binding, thereby sparing your spouse from having to make such a heart-wrenching decision.
You can also give your spouse control over your estate assets or shift that control to someone else in the event that you become incapacitated through the creation of a revocable living trust. You name yourself as the Trustee and transfer important assets into the trust. As long as you are capable, you continue to control the trust assets; however, if you become incapacitated, control shifts to your designated successor Trustee. If you want to shield your spouse from the need to make difficult financial decisions under such circumstances, you can appoint a friend, family member, or attorney as your successor Trustee. Conversely, if you want to make sure your spouse gets control over the assets quickly, you can appoint your spouse as the successor Trustee.
How to Protect Your Spouse from Litigation Using Your Estate Plan
Sadly, the death or incapacity of a family member often spurs costly and emotionally exhausting litigation. Your estate plan, however, offers numerous opportunities to prevent your spouse from having to deal with litigation.
Executing a healthcare power of attorney, for instance, allows you to decide who will make healthcare decisions for you if you cannot make them. Making your wishes clear – and legally binding – ahead of time drastically reduces the likelihood of a legal dispute over who will make those decisions.
Including a no-contest clause in your Will or trust agreement is another excellent deterrent to litigation. In short, such as clause provides a beneficiary an incentive for not contesting your Will or trust and provides the threat of losing a sure-fire inheritance if they choose to move forward with litigation.
Do You Need Help Protecting Your Spouse Using Your Estate Plan?
For more information, please join us for an upcoming FREE seminar. If you want to learn more about how you can use your estate plan to protect your spouse, contact our estate planning attorneys in our North Andover, Woburn, and Beverly offices at (978) 969-0331. Our Salem and Nashua, New Hampshire office can be reached at (603) 894-4141.
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