I’d like to talk to you about our 4-step estate planning process.
Our first meeting is called the Right Fit meeting. During this meeting, we’ll talk about you, your family and your goals and objectives.Then we’ll offer a suggestion of a strategy to deal with your goals and objectives. After this meeting, if you decide to move forward with us, we’ll schedule the next meeting, which is the design meeting.
Our second meeting together is our design meeting. During this meeting, I’ll ask you a lot of questions about how you want your estate to work. I’ll ask you questions such as who you want to inherit your property and how you want them to receive it. I’ll also ask you questions about who you want in the important roles in your estate.
For example:
- Who do you want tobe the successor trustee of your trust?
- Who do you want to be the agentunder a durable power of attorney for finances?
- Who you want to be your health care agent?
These are just some of the questions that I’ll ask you during the design meeting. After the design meeting, we begin to prepare your planned documents. Once we’re done with drafting your documents, we’ll send them to you to review. Then the next step is to schedule the third meeting, which is the review meeting.
Our third meeting together is the review meeting. By this meeting, you should have received drafts ofyour estate planning documents and have gone over them. During the review meeting, we’ll hit the high points of your plan and make sure that we have the right people in the right roles for your plan. We’ll make sure that everything is the way that you want it to be in your plan. We’ll also answer any questions that you may have. Finally, if you have any changes to your plan, let us know and of course, we’ll make those.
Our fourth and final meeting is the signing meeting. By this point, we’ve prepared your documents and we’ve had the review meeting where we’ve gone over everything and make sure that it’s the way that you want it to be. At the signing meeting, you sign the documents.This is done in front of a notary, so please bring your driver’s license or a government issued picture ID. If we’re preparing deeds for you, you will sign the deeds to transfer your home into the trust.
After the signing meeting, you are done with your estate plan. We’ll sign and notarize all the documentsthat need to be signed and notarized. Then we’ll scan the documents and create a USB drive containing PDFs of all of your estate planning documents. We’ll send you your final original estate planning documents in the estate planning binder along with a USB drive containing PDFs of all of your documents. If we’ve prepared a deed for you, we’ll mail the deed to the county recorder so that the deed gets recorded.
This is an overview of our estate planning process. I’m Matthew Crowder, and I look forward to working with you.
