Divorce and Estate Planning

We’d all like to think that once you have made a will and possibly done some other estate planning, that you’ll never have to worry about doing it again.  If an estate plan is done right AND you have no major life changes, that may very well be true.  I recently had a couple come see me who had done wills back in 1981.  They had them updated (amended via adding codicils) back in 1997.  And, for the most part, the wills were still pretty applicable today.  So, 1981 to 2018, with a minor updating in 1997 – I told them that they pretty much got their money’s worth out of those wills.  However, their life was pretty stable – they remained married that entire time and their children were already born when the wills were first drafted.  So, that was a relatively stable 37 years of their life.  Ironically, it wasn’t a change in their own marriage that led them to get a new set of wills done in 2018 – it was a situation in one of their children’s marriage that necessitated the new wills.  In this case, they were concerned about […]