What you need to know about divorce and estate planning
Divorces are obviously messy affairs: they involve hurt feelings, anger, and messy financial and legal complications. When you get divorced, that is a good time to re-evaluate your Will and estate plan. You have to consider not only splitting up your assets, but your insurance policies, Power of Attorney, Living Will, retirement and more.
The very first thing you can do is to reassess and change your Last Will and Testament (that one is obvious). You’re most likely going to want to change up your Last Will and change who your beneficiaries are. You may want to remove your ex-spouse as your Executor (if you have that person listed as your Executor). If you have step-parents, step-children and the like, you may also want to make the same changes to your Will.
Divorce can change your estate plan in its entirety. The following other steps should be taken to change up your estate plan:
- Change your Power of Attorney (for the same reasons you would change up your Last Will).
- If you have a Trust, you may want to have it changed. You may want to consider a domestic asset trust.
- Re-evaluate your insurance policies (who is going to be a beneficiary on your life insurance, for instance?) Are you going to have a new beneficiary?
- Splitting up your retirement accounts (this should be obvious). It may be a complicated and tedious process to go through, but one that is necessary, however.
Divorces can be hard to go through, and the legal paperwork to wade through can also be a lot to do deal with: it can be tiring, emotional and wear you down. All of these are necessary tasks to engage in when you are divorced. Your estate plan should be changed, just like how everything else in your life will change after a divorce. You can read more by clicking on the link below:
