Model Wills and Trusts
Every estate attorney needs a base of ready answers, clauses, and documents. The larger your collection, the more time you can devote to assessing the big-picture needs of your estate planning clients and applying your judgment and experience. This 714-page book contains 74 forms, dozens of clauses, numerous practice tips and more, all supported with 435 recent cases. For example
Practice Aids
- Use the Client Questionnaire to get your client invested in the process and identify topics in advance that you should be prepared to discuss. §1:01
- Avoid problems down the road that cannot be corrected by withdrawal with the Conflicts of Interest Disclosure for Spouses. §1:02
- Clarify how you will be paid with the Fee Agreement. §1:03
- Prevent incorrect assumptions with the Tax Planning Flowcharts. §1:05
- Answer questions in advance, aid client review, and document your advice with these detailed Cover Letters. §1:06
Practice Tips
Preliminary concerns
- To protect against a deemed gift, name the spouse as beneficiary of at least 50% of each retirement plan, IRA, or life insurance policy. §3:43
All wills
- Wills executed using bank notaries frequently end up with errors on the face of the documents. Discourage clients who want to execute wills by themselves. §10:60
- Clients often wish to give the guardian liberal access to the children’s inheritance, but this can create issues of self-dealing or conflicts of interest which then must be addressed in the will. A simpler alternative is to use this clause to …. §10:114
- If a testator has children from a previous marriage, he should consider leaving the homestead to the surviving spouse and providing for the children out of other assets. Why? The children may not be able to sell or use the property for some time. §10:162
Tax-planned wills
- If the surviving spouse is given a lifetime power to withdraw trust principal, consider limiting the power to an ascertainable standard like health, education, maintenance, and support. This limitation gives the executor of a QTIP trust the flexibility to…. In a GPOA trust, this limitation may provide…. §13:80
- If a QTIP trust is funded in part with an IRA or Roth IRA, the will or trust document should contain a clause like the following that redefines “income.” §13:123
- Texas provides little help to the victim of imprecise drafting, since it has no statute that would effectively limit an otherwise unlimited power. Texas practitioners are thus advised to confine themselves to language specifically permitted by Treas Reg section 20.2041-1(c)(2). §13:165
Trusts
- Creditor protection can be undermined by appointing the beneficiary as trustee, giving the beneficiary the right to remove the trustee, or giving the beneficiary the right to compel distributions. §20:73
- Clients are often surprised to learn that even with a living trust, an estate tax return must be filed, bypass trusts must be funded, and the heirs may not get all their money until the IRS issues a closing letter. §21:14
- If a revocable trust owns a checking account that the settler-trustee uses for personal expenses, he should have his own name printed on the checks. §23:02
Speed is important when you charge fixed fees for creating wills and trusts, but imprecise drafting can lead to costly errors. The book's drafting recommendations include sample clauses that you may copy and paste from the book's free CD-ROM. The issue-oriented text is to-the point, delivered without hedging, and is well-supported with recent cases. Tax considerations, consequences and opportunities are clearly presented and supported with examples. Plus 38 wills and trusts are included on the CD-ROM for easy access and modification.
Included with the book is a CD-ROM containing a searchable full-text of the book as well as all the forms from the book. The forms can be easily accessed and modified with your preferred word processing program. No installation necessary.
Texas Estate Planning
