Audra Lowe: It's one of life's issues that always gets put on the backburner, but if you have the family, estate planning is specially important. Yes, eventually it's time to create a will. We spoke with a top attorney and found that why it's essential to creating an estate plan and protect your assets and your family.
Anthony F. Vitiello: My name is Anthony Vitiello. I run the Tax and Estate Planning Group at Connell Foley in Roseland, New Jersey. The best definition and most broad definition of estate planning is, the transfer of assets at death and the handling of your affairs at death. A family must establish an estate plan if they have minor children. If a parent has a minor child, it's imperative that they put will in place. And that might be the extent of their state planning. To put a will in place, you need to work with an attorney and the reason is writing a will is a practice of law.
Now, there are some websites out there that have basic will forms, but you really take a chance by using those Internet sites and the reason is every state, the New Jersey has different requirements than New York in terms of signing a will and making sure will can get probated. Thus, you want to ensure that you use a lawyer in the state of your residence, so that those procedures are followed.
A simple will, will deal with the appointment of a guardian, if a parent dies with having minor children. The reason why we want parents with minor children to have a will is to appoint a guardian if in the event both parents are deceased. The guardianship is an important and probably the most important piece of a will for anyone who either doesn't have money or in terms of significant amount of assets or is young and has minor children.
The other reason for having an estate plan or having a basic will is if you have assets to transfer at your death. It's much better to have a will and set forth how your assets transferred than you live it up to the state to decide how your assets will pass.
An example of a typical family, young family who needs an estate plan is client of mine, Richard Cella. They have a very typical, good family with young children with issues of ensuring that if one of the parents passes away their assets pass appropriately to the survivor and then to the children interest.
Allison Cella: One incident that did happen in the past to a friend of ours was a young friend that passed away at the age 33 leaving a two-year-old and a three-month-old and that prompted us to realize that we needed to protect our children and have something set up in case something happened and to realize that it could happen to anyone.
Richard Cella: And in terms of the laws it was a great concern of ours is that if we didn't have anything in place that the basically State of New Jersey would really come in and take over and decide where the kids would actually be placed, and that was a big concern to us. We didn't want them to tell, our family is who and who and decide their fate. So that was a real key point to us, and that has really pushed the process to more quickly and that's why we did it.
In terms of cost and everything it's really small in terms of the overall ramifications of it, because you're talking about depending upon the type of client who could be significant assets and you're talking about your children here which is the greatest asset of all.
Audra Lowe: Well, it's definitely one of the most important plans that you're going to make for your family. Take the time out to do it. As we see on the piece, you'll sleep better knowing that your family is protected. And we'll be right back.
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