HOW “SHOPPING AROUND” FOR AN ESTATE PLAN COULD LEAVE YOUR FAMILY WITH AN EXPENSIVE, UNINTENDED MESS

Maybe you’ve heard that before investing in a professional service you should “get three estimates.” While often this is wise advice, it could actually be a very bad idea when it comes to your estate planning, or getting your will or trust in place.

Here’s why you may not want to “shop around” for an estate plan, and how you can ensure you get the most efficient and affordable plan possible for your family without shopping for an estate planning lawyer the way you may think.

Let’s begin with why “getting three estimates” for an estate plan may not work to actually get you what you want.

First and foremost, getting estimates assumes you understand exactly what you are shopping for and how to evaluate those estimates. In most cases, from the most sophisticated business people to the highest net worth to those just starting out in the workforce and on their path to adulthood, we see that you very likely do not know how to evaluate estimates when shopping for an estate plan.

Shopping for an estate plan based on getting the lowest cost plan possible is often the fastest path to leaving your family with an empty set of documents (maybe in a beautiful binder, but not worth the paper they are written on) that won’t actually work for your family when they need it.

Unfortunately, we see the negative effects of cheap estate planning when family members come to us during a time of grief with that fancy binder that sat on the shelf for years sending out signals of false security, full of out of date estate planning documents and find themselves stuck in what could have been an avoidable court process, or even conflict, when that’s exactly what their loved one thought they had paid someone to handle for them.