Getting Your Affairs in Order

How to declutter your life, what happens if you die without a will, uses and purposes of essential trusts, the responsibilities of trustees and executors, a dire warning to your IRA beneficiaries, how to provide protection if you become incapacitated, your other wills, business buy-sell agreements, what records you need to keep, ethical wills and statements of values, estate liquidity, how to choose a guardian and arrange for an allowance for them, how assets can be left to minors, and a priceless gift you can give your married children.

Book contains 14 checklists.

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From the Introduction

Everyone’s affairs end up the same way – distributed, dispersed or dumped.

Sometimes it is easy and sometimes difficult. The easier it is, the better the chance that the deceased’s affairs are settled the way they wanted and with as little extra time and cost as possible.

This process starts with you, and can start today – or not at all. That is up to you.

This book will show you how to arrange your affairs so that you will have a better handle on your finances; your heirs will know what you want done and how; and possibly with as little distress to them as can be considering that this process is always upsetting because it injects memories of a loved one that is gone.

Arranging affairs is difficult because life interferes with a lot of “wish I could do’s” or “need to do’s.” This book will lay out things you can do in an easy way to follow. The consequences of not following certain rules and, where applicable, laws are illustrated. For example, everyone has a will. It is either a will you cause to be written or the default will the state imposes on your estate. Neglecting doing something does not eliminate the need but rather says you prefer the way the state will dispose of your assets and that you won’t mind the added costs, bother and time because you won’t be around anyway.

Included here are worksheets and forms that can be filled in quite easily by you. If doing anything that needs to be done should prove difficult, think about the problems your heirs will have trying to find and assemble everything you had, or owed, and then report it to the governments involved and disburse the rightful shares to those you designated in the manner and at the time you determined.

Sometimes we look back and realize we would have liked to have done or said something better or different. Now is a good time to write it out as a final memo to those that were either affected or would have benefited. It can’t change what was done, but might make the person appreciative of your thoughts. There is a chapter inside explaining what to do with final remarks.