Do It Yourselfers, Probate, and Wills
I recently came across two interesting articles that talk about probate and Wills from the perspective of "do it yourselfers."
1. This post, from Deirdre R. Wheatley-Liss's You and Yours Blawg, talks about two cases where individuals took the Home Depot approach to estate planning, and prepared their own (faulty) Wills.
2. This Lynn Bremer column about a probate-obsessed do it yourselfer.
To my mind, the thread that ties these articles together is efficiency (the efficiency of good estate planning, the inefficiency of bad or incomplete estate planning). Efficiency requires some type of quantification, asking questions like:
-What, specifically, are the costs of probate? The man is Ms. Bremer's column is spending a lot of time, and creating a lot of problems, to avoid a situation (probate) that may be neither expensive nor time-consuming.
-What, specifically, are the costs of doing an estate plan correctly when compared to the costs of fixing a defective estate plan tomorrow? Perhaps where your money goes after your death isn't a concern of yours -- in that case, it's probably fine if you go the "as cheap as possible" route in planning your estate. But if you do want to control your property upon death or take care of your spouse and/or descendants, wouldn't you at least check out the costs of hiring a good estate planning attorney, and compare those costs to what must be paid if you make a mess of things?
