Articles Tagged with Illinois estate law

C0C54501-81B9-4A14-AC38-1A89563B3C05-300x200Most parents who put off estate planning aren’t avoiding the hard emotional part, thinking about their own mortality. They’re avoiding it because it feels like a project for someday, something to handle once things settle down. The problem is that the mistakes parents make in this area rarely show up as a single dramatic failure. They show up quietly, in documents that were never created, or created once and never updated, and the family only discovers the gap when it’s already too late to fix it the easy way.

Here are the mistakes I see most often, and what actually protects your kids instead.

1. Not Naming a Guardian for Your Minor Children

0ED865D4-2044-49CD-B2CD-AA8A15390BF8-300x200Most estate plans were built around a picture of what a person owns that no longer matches how people actually live. A house, a car, a bank account, some furniture. But think about what’s actually sitting on your phone and in the cloud right now. Photos of your kids that only exist on your phone or in a cloud account. Years of email. A cryptocurrency wallet. A small online business or Etsy shop. Airline miles, streaming subscriptions, social media accounts your family will want to memorialize or shut down.

None of that fits neatly into a traditional will written for physical property, and if nobody has planned for it specifically, your family could find themselves locked out of things you fully intended for them to have.

Why “They’ll Just Log In” Doesn’t Work

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