Connecticut Estate Planning Attorneys Who Plan Differently

Estate Planning is a process where an attorney learns about you, your family dynamics, your assets, your goals, and your concerns, and determines the best way to achieve your goals. Estate planning manages the transfer of property at death, as well as the care of you and your assets if you are incapacitated.

Estate planning is important because we all have people and causes that we care about, and because we are, unfortunately and inevitably, all going to die. It is the one true certainty in life. Estate planning is crucial for everyone, regardless of their income or assets.  Protecting your loved ones, and the nest egg that you have spent your life building, is just one part of estate planning. A comprehensive estate plan can also help you plan for incapacity, disability, and other unexpected events that may affect your ability to manage your affairs. Please see our detailed discussion of the Importance of Estate Planning here.

Which documents are essential largely depends upon your goals, but let’s review the 5 most common documents.

• Your Last Will is a legal document that helps to distribute your assets upon death. Other assets will be distributed not based on your Last Will but on your beneficiary designations. Upon death, the only way to make a Last Will valid is to file it in the probate court. Probate is a public process that ensures taxes and creditors are paid before your assets are distributed. It is normally a lengthy process, which can add expense, and it can be complicated for those left behind.
• A Trust is another common tool, and it can function as a substitute for a Will because it also distributes your assets upon death. The main trust-based planning tool used is a Revocable Living Trust. The benefit of a Trust over a Will is that a Trust need not be filed with the probate court to be effective. As a result, a Trust remains private. And because a trust can be administered free from the oversight of the probate court, it can be simpler, less costly, and less stressful for your family. There are many types of trusts to help achieve various goals such as asset protection, asset management for those with addiction issues or special needs, and tax savings, to name a few.
• A Living Will provides your end-of-life decisions to help ensure that those wishes will be honored by both your family and healthcare providers.
• A Healthcare Power of Attorney and Advance Directive name a healthcare Agent or Representative and can provide parameters around day-to-day medical decisions in the event that you are unable to make those decisions for yourself.
• A General Durable Power of Attorney appoints an Agent, also known as an Attorney in Fact, to manage your legal and financial matters if you are incapacitated and unable to do so.

There are many other documents that may be involved in the estate planning process that could benefit you and help ensure that your plan works the way you want it to. We use a variety of documents beyond those listed above to help clients create a plan that will bring peace of mind. To learn more, contact us.

There are many differences between a will and a revocable living trust (“trust”).

• Court: A will requires that your estate goes through probate with full probate court supervision, a trust can help avoid the supervision of the probate court.
• Privacy: A will goes through a public process in the probate court, a trust can remain private.
• Time: A will goes through the probate process on the probate court’s timeline, a trust can often be administered more quickly.
• Cost: Wills cost less to put in place, but tend to cost more to administer upon death because they often require more attorney hours going through the probate process, take more time, and are more open to challenges. Trusts tend to cost more money up front, but often require less attorney time after death to administer when properly funded.
• Ease: Wills require probate court involvement throughout every step of administration. Because of the cost and delays of probate court, families often find it much easier to administer an estate that is held in a properly funded trust.
• Challenge: It is more difficult to challenge a trust than a will.
• Incapacity Planning: A will cannot provide incapacity planning, but a trust can. A will is effective when you sign it but does not function until you die, whereas a trust begins to function once you sign it and put something in it. This means that a trust can provide lifetime instructions, not only instructions upon death. This is often used to plan for incapacity with instructions contained within the trust document itself.
• Continued Control: A will provides that any beneficiaries who are legal adults receive their shares outright (unless the will contains a trust). A trust often incorporates continuing trusts to hold assets until certain ages and stages, or to pass them on in an asset protected way.
• Asset Protection: Wills do not have asset protection features, but trusts can be crafted to contain asset protection for beneficiaries.
• Taxation: A trust can build in tax planning to mitigate taxation.

Want to learn more? Download our Wills vs. Trusts Comparison Guide here.

To choose guardians for your minor children you must create a legally binding document. Choosing guardians is often why younger adults decide to create their estate plan. However, choosing permanent guardians is just one part of creating a plan that will help to protect your family if something happens to you.

An experienced estate planning attorney can not only document your choices but can also help ensure that you consider the many factors that go into choosing the right guardians and successor guardians for your children. Sometimes the seemingly obvious choice may not be the best choice, other times there are many potential guardians to choose from and concern about hurt feelings and family harmony when making the choices. The right attorney will walk you through that decision making process and help you choose the best option for your family. Your attorney should also be helping you to think beyond merely naming a permanent guardian. There are many other steps that you can take to help protect your children and make the transition to a permanent guardian easier. We have a unique strategy and set of documents to help protect minor children in a way that few law firms do.

Yes, you can, and should, plan to ensure that someone can step into your shoes and manage your affairs if you become incapacitated. If you do not, the court may choose someone for you that you may not want to serve in this role, called a conservator. Appointing someone is accomplished in a will-based plan through powers of attorney. A trust-based plan utilizes not only powers of attorney but also can build in incapacity planning within the trust document itself, which can be a significant advantage over will-based plans for many people.

When someone is no longer able to care for themselves, a conservator may be appointed by the probate court. There are two main kinds of conservatorship: conservatorship of the estate, and conservatorship of the person.

Conservatorship of the estate means that there is a need for someone else to manage the day-to-day legal and financial affairs of the affected person, ensuring that their bills are paid and their property is cared for.

Conservatorship of the person involves supervision of personal affairs and ensuring basic needs like food, shelter, clothing and health care, are met.

If you die without a will or trust, you are what is called “intestate”, and the state has a plan for you. For most people this is not the plan that they would choose for themselves. This plan is found in your state’s intestate succession statutes.

Your estate is divided up based on the state statutes, which typically look at the class of people most closely related to you by what we call a table of consanguinity. While this might sound like a good result, the division of property among relatives is often not what you would expect it to be. Most of us want to choose who will receive the result of our lifetime of hard work. Creating a will or trust will ensure that you can make this choice.

A probate judge will appoint someone to serve as your Administrator, also sometimes called the Executor or Personal Representative. This person might be somebody related to you, but might also be a professional. This person is in charge of moving your estate through the probate court process on the court’s timeline, ensuring that debts get paid, and ultimately dividing up your estate based on the state statutes. Creating a will or trust will make your wishes legally binding.

If you already have some estate documents in place, you may think you don’t need to examine your estate plan. Here’s why you do.

• Estate planning documents by themselves are meaningless to your family if they are not kept up to date throughout your lifetime, and if your assets are not owned in the right way to keep your family out of court and out of conflict when something happens to you.
• If there have been any changes in your life, the law, your assets, or the people you named to inherit or make decisions since you put in place those documents, and the documents have not been updated, you should speak to an attorney to make sure that your plan still serves you and your family.
• People age or die, relationships change, assets change, and most people don’t think about updating their plans. Even something that seems as though no changes are needed, such as a power of attorney, may be viewed as stale and refused by institutions.
• And, if you have minor children, there is a chance that the documents were not prepared sufficiently in the first place. Unfortunately, most lawyers simply do not think to plan beyond permanent guardianship for the care of minor children. And our furry family members are often forgotten about entirely.

Our office has a process to help ensure our clients stay on top of how changes in their life impact their plan. Contact us to learn more.

Even if you don’t have much in the way of financial assets, here is why you still need estate planning:

• You may have children or pets that rely on you that you want to protect.
• You likely want to control who makes medical decisions for you if you cannot.
• You likely want to control who makes end of life decisions if you cannot.
• You likely want to be able to control who manages your day-to-day affairs legally and financially if you cannot do so yourself.
• You likely want to ensure that whatever assets you do have get into the right hands, even if they are more meaningful than valuable.
• You do not want the assets that you do have to end up in the department of unclaimed property, or in the hands of a beneficiary that you do not want to have them.
• You care about your family and likely do not want to leave them with a mess during a time of grief.
• After you are gone, your loved ones will miss you deeply – they will long for your words of wisdom, and hearing an old voicemail or reading a letter from you again would be a tremendous gift. This should be part of the planning process and has nothing to do with money.

The good news and bad news is that, in recent years, most of us do not have enough assets to be taxed at the State or Federal level.

In 2017, Congress passed the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act which significantly increased the Federal estate tax exemption amount and further increased the exemption each January. Connecticut also increased its exemption amount, and in 2023 it matched the federal exemption amount of $12.92 million per person.

In Rhode Island, the story is different. The 2023 State of Rhode Island estate tax exemption amount was $1.733 million per person, with efforts being made to increase it to $3,000,000. While most people are still not affected by this tax, the state estate tax exemption is more often a consideration in Rhode Island. Using trust-based planning can help ensure that you and your family are able to maximize the state exemption amount.

If you have a high-net-worth estate where you may be subject to estate taxes, more complex planning can help to mitigate and minimize those taxes, saving your family huge sums of money.

It is important to note that the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act sunsets on December 31, 2025, and it is unknown what the new exemption amounts will look like after that date. It is widely expected among estate planning practitioners that the Federal exemption amount will fall significantly, regardless of what the makeup of the White House or Congress looks like. The state estate tax exemption amounts are expected to fall as well. The law, especially on estate tax exemptions, is changing every year. Therefore, it is imperative to continue to periodically examine whether your estate plan works the way that you want it to under the current laws.

You certainly could, but here is why you may not want to. You may save some money now, but you could cost your family far more money in future fees and taxes if you fail to craft your documents properly.

• Attorneys spend three years in law school and then years more learning their craft. Hundreds or even thousands of hours are spent studying and continuing to learn their areas of concentration. What you are paying for when you hire an estate planning attorney is not time spent filling in the blanks on a document, it is their education, experience, and thought process. It is not the document that will get you the results you seek, it is the decision-making before deciding how to craft that document. This is the time that the attorney spends learning about you and using their knowledge gained in those thousands of hours of practice and education to know what questions to ask, what factors to consider and how to approach your situation to get you the outcome you want.
• Documents cannot replace relationships, and are only as good as a myriad of factors that go into making them. You have worked your whole life to accumulate what you own and likely do not want to risk the outcome. In addition, money aside, estate planning is also about the protection of relationships. When a loved one passes away, the stress is high and large amounts of money and highly sentimental items are at stake. It is not uncommon for families to fall apart as a result of infighting after a loved one passes. An attorney can help head off some of that potential for conflict.
• The best outcome for you and your family is achieved by working with an attorney who works in estate planning daily.

Estate planning costs vary greatly and depend upon many factors such as whether you are married, who is preparing your plan and what planning tools are utilized.

• A DIY online will with no attorney involvement is going to cost less than an attorney.
• The cost of a plan prepared by an attorney who is running a high-volume mill practice will be more than a DIY plan, but less than an experienced estate planning practitioner who is doing customized and comprehensive planning. This is because attorney face time is very limited, and you receive a one-size-fits-all plan.
• An experienced practitioner creating customized and comprehensive plans will cost more than an attorney running a mill-style practice, but the cost among attorneys can vary quite a bit as each attorney has a different approach and may leverage different planning tools to meet your needs.

The most important thing to consider if you are price shopping is to ensure you know what is included and how the process works so that you know whether you are really comparing apples to apples. Unless you are an estate planning attorney, you don’t know what you don’t know about estate planning. Don’t assume that you know what you need and that all attorneys and their processes are fungible.

We know that pricing is an important consideration. That is why our estate planning fees are almost always charged on a flat-fee basis, so that you know exactly what you will be paying. While we cannot quote final fees without a plan design choice, we do discuss ranges as part of our intake process. We invite you to contact us to take the next steps for you and your family.

Depending on the level of coverage offered by your employer’s legal insurance plan, you may be able to receive a significant discount on estate planning services. It is important to note that not all documents and services that are part of a comprehensive estate plan may be covered. When selecting an attorney who participates in your employer’s legal insurance plan, be sure to confirm your specific plan’s level of coverage and ask the attorney for details about their process.