Financial Education: Estate Planning — Three Things to do in an Hour

January 03, 2011

Have you seen the new show – that re-make of Hawaii 5-0?  Here is the premise: A divorced cop (James Caan’s son) from New Jersey moves to Hawaii to be near his young daughter – add some hip native Hawaiian cops and skimpy bathing suits.  Doesn’t sound like a winner, does it?  Well if you guessed that it was almost unbearable to watch, you were correct.  Did I watch the whole show?  Yes.  I am not sure why but it was a complete waste of time.

I can’t get that wasted hour back but you can by never watching that show.  If you truly want to make an impact on your finances, there is something you can do in an hour – estate planning.  Many people put off estate planning because it is one of those important but not urgent things on the “to do” list.

Here are three things you can do in an hour to at least get started with estate planning:

1.       Find your will and other legal paperwork such as durable power of attorney and health care documents such as your living will or medical powers of attorney.  Read them and make sure it is up to date.  Then make a copy of them and put the copy in a file called “important paper” that you put in the front of your filing cabinet.  Write down where the originals are.  Then call your executor and give him or her all of that information.

2.       If you don’t have a will, start one. Do you own anything?  Have children?  If so, you may want a will so the courts don’t decide who will get your property and become the guardian of your children.  Use this hour to do a little research.  Find out if you have any estate benefits at work.  Some companies have free or reduced cost estate planning documents and other legal benefits.  If you don’t have a free benefit, research online will programs.  Check out www.nolo.com, a low cost legal document service.

3.       If you don’t have a trust, look into one. Have you accumulated some assets over the years or own real property and want to avoid probate?  Do you have someone you’d like to provide for in case you aren’t there to do it such as a handicapped child?  Getting a trust will take more than an hour of course, but you can put an hour to good use by learning about trusts.

Here are a couple of resources to get you started:

5 Steps to Estate Planning

Article on estate planning – Clint Eastwood Style!

You could also watch the movie Gran Torino directed by Clint Eastwood (the above article is based on it).  It takes more than an hour of course, but compared to the Hawaii 5-0 remake, trust me, time will fly by instead of slowly ticking away like you are being tortured but can’t seem to turn off the TV.