New York Estate Planning

An estate plan decides two things: who takes care of matters if you cannot, and where what you own goes when you die. Doing nothing does not avoid those questions. It hands them to a statute and to a court, which will answer them without reference to what you would have wanted.

Good planning is less about documents than about the specific facts of a family. What you own, how it is titled, who depends on you, who does not get along with whom, and what you actually want to happen. The documents follow from that conversation. We do not begin with a template.

What a plan usually includes

Wills. Directs how your property passes, names the person who will administer your estate, and, if you have minor children, nominates their guardian. That last function is the reason a will matters even for people who think they have too little to plan around.

Trusts. A trust holds property under terms you set. Depending on how it is built, it can keep assets out of probate, provide for someone who should not receive money outright, protect against creditors, or carry property across generations on your terms rather than the default ones. Revocable trusts stay under your control during life. Irrevocable trusts give up that control in exchange for protections that control would otherwise defeat.

Powers of attorney. Authorizes someone to act on your financial affairs if you cannot. New York’s statutory form is particular, and a power of attorney that banks refuse to accept is worse than useless, because it is discovered at exactly the moment it is needed.

Health care proxies and living wills. Names who speaks for you on medical decisions and records what you want done.

Beneficiary designations. Retirement accounts, life insurance and payable-on-death accounts pass by designation and ignore your will completely. Plans fail here more often than anywhere else, usually because a form filled out years ago names someone who is no longer in the picture.

How we work

We start by understanding what you own and how it is held, then what you want to happen and to whom. From there we recommend a structure and explain the tradeoffs, including the ones that cut against the recommendation. We draft, we revise until it is right, and we supervise execution, which in New York has formalities that invalidate wills when they are not observed.

We also tell you when your existing plan is fine and does not need replacing. That happens more often than the industry admits.

When to revisit a plan

After any significant change in your family or your finances, and otherwise every few years. Marriage, divorce, a birth, a death, a move to another state, the sale of a business, or a material change in the value or nature of what you own. Plans rarely fail because they were badly drafted at the outset. They fail because the world moved and the documents did not.

A note on why this is drafted the way it is

The firm handles contested estates as well as planning ones. That experience shapes the drafting. Certain provisions reliably produce litigation, certain fiduciary appointments reliably produce conflict, and certain kinds of silence in a document reliably produce a fight among the people left behind. Planning here is done by someone who has seen how these documents behave once their author is no longer available to explain them.