Peter’s practice includes preparing several types of estate planning documents, including wills, trusts, durable powers of attorney, living wills, and health care surrogate designations (advanced directives). These are explained briefly below.
Wills are documents which provide instructions concerning the distribution of the real property and personal property of the person. We spend time with out clients to get to know what their priorities are concerning the way their property is handled after their eventual death, and work with out clients to make sure their will reflects their intentions.
Generally, when a person dies, their will is submitted to the Circuit Court in the county in which they resided at the time of death and the Court oversees the administration of the estate according to the terms of the will. Court proceedings are generally considered public, and in this way, a person’s will becomes a document in the official court record of the estate which is available for inspection by the public at large.
Powers of attorney, sometimes called durable powers of attorney, are documents in which the principal (the person who executes the document) authorizes another person or persons to act on their behalf. Typically, this authority is given by the principal so their agent may help manage the principal’s financial and business affairs, including making and managing investments with the principal’s resources, buyer and selling real property on behalf of the principal, and paying bills or pursuing claims on behalf of the principal, when the principal may be unable to act on their on behalf.
Another type of document we routinely prepare for estate planning clients are called advanced directives. These include living wills and healthcare surrogate designations. Living wills allow a person to specifically state whether it is their intention to be kept alive by certain artificial means. Health care surrogate designations allow a person to identify those individuals who are authorized to make treatment decisions on their behalf.
Trusts which are sometimes called “living trust” or “revocable trusts”, are another type of estate planning instrument. Owning something in trust means holding it for the benefit of person, entity, or group of people. Trust agreements or trust instruments are the documents which set forth the purposes of this type of ownership for the benefit of another.
Trust agreements provide the specific duties, obligations, and powers under which the person who owns the property (the trustee) may hold, manage, and distribute the trust’s assets. They also contain the identities of individuals, entities, or groups of individuals who are the beneficiaries, and provide the conditions setting forth when and under what conditions the beneficiaries should receive distributions of trust property and income.
While the trustees, beneficiaries, and certain other individuals or companies (such as banks) may be entitled to examine portions of the trust instrument, the trust instrument is not submitted to the court during probate and generally the terms remain undisclosed to the public. This allows for greater privacy in one’s estate planning.