Before holiday travel, family gatherings, and the new year fill your calendar, consider setting aside some time to review your estate plan. Estate planning isn’t necessarily something you complete once and then never revisit. Your finances, property, family relationships, and the people you trust to help carry out your wishes can all change over time.
For households in O’Fallon, St. Charles County, Springfield, and other Missouri communities, a new account, property purchase, marriage, divorce, death in the family, or other significant life event may be a reason to review an existing plan.
A year-end review doesn’t mean every document needs to be replaced. Instead, it gives you an opportunity to identify changes, locate important documents, and determine whether the different pieces of your plan still work together.
Here are seven areas to consider.
1. Review Your Financial Power of Attorney
Start by locating your financial power of attorney and reviewing who you’ve named to act on your behalf.
Ask yourself whether that person is still someone you trust and whether they remain willing and practically able to serve. If you’ve named an alternate agent, review that choice as well.
Changes in health, location, family relationships, or other circumstances can affect whether someone remains an appropriate choice.
Also consider the practical side of the document.
Do you know where the complete signed document is stored? Could the appropriate person locate it if it were needed? If you’ve previously experienced difficulty using the document with a bank or another institution, save any correspondence or information about the problem and bring it to your estate-planning review.
The authority granted by the document and its practical use should both be considered.
Avoid assuming that your financial power of attorney automatically provides authority for health care decisions. Those responsibilities should be reviewed separately.
2. Check Your Health Care Documents and Contacts
Next, review your health care planning documents.
Confirm who you’ve selected to make decisions when applicable and whether you’ve named appropriate alternatives. Make sure the contact information you have for those people is still current.
Your own wishes may have changed too.
Review the documents with your present circumstances in mind rather than assuming that choices made years ago still reflect what you want today.
It’s also worth considering where these documents are stored and whether the appropriate people know how to find them when needed.
A carefully prepared document isn’t particularly useful if no one can locate it during an urgent situation.
If you’re uncertain about what your existing documents authorize or whether they still reflect your wishes, include them in your year-end estate-planning review.
3. Review Your Will and Trust Instructions
Family changes are an important reason to revisit wills and trusts.
Think about what has happened since your documents were prepared or last reviewed.
Changes might include:
- Marriage
- Divorce
- Birth or adoption of a child
- A new grandchild
- Death of a family member or beneficiary
- Significant changes in family relationships
- Changes involving someone named to carry out the plan
- Major changes in property or finances
Then read your existing instructions with those changes in mind.
Do the documents still reflect the people and priorities you intended?
If something needs to change, avoid making handwritten edits or informal additions and assuming they’ll accomplish the desired legal result. Estate-planning documents have execution and coordination requirements that should be considered when updates are made.
Bring the existing documents to an attorney and discuss the changes you want.
4. Check Beneficiary Designations
Your will isn’t necessarily the only document controlling where property goes after your death.
Accounts and insurance policies may have beneficiary designations that direct how those particular assets are handled.
Review both primary and contingent beneficiaries where applicable.
You might check beneficiary information associated with:
- Life insurance
- Retirement accounts
- Certain investment or financial accounts
- Other assets with beneficiary designations
Pay attention to names that may no longer reflect your circumstances.
A beneficiary designation created years ago can easily be forgotten while the rest of an estate plan changes around it.
Ask how each designation coordinates with your broader estate plan rather than viewing the account in isolation.
If you make a beneficiary change, keep confirmation that it was actually completed. A submitted form or online request isn’t necessarily the same thing as confirmation that the institution’s records now reflect the change.
5. Review Trust Funding and Newly Acquired Assets
If you have a trust, year-end is a useful time to ask whether the assets intended to be connected with it have actually been addressed.
Creating a trust document and coordinating property with that trust are related but separate parts of planning.
New assets can create gaps after the original estate-planning work is completed.
For example, you may have:
- Opened a new financial account
- Purchased additional property
- Changed financial institutions
- Replaced an existing account
- Acquired another significant asset
- Changed ownership or beneficiary arrangements
Don’t automatically transfer an asset simply because you have a trust.
Different assets can have different ownership, beneficiary, tax, or planning considerations. The appropriate treatment depends on the asset and the overall plan.
Instead, create a list of property or accounts acquired or changed since your last review and discuss how they should be coordinated.
6. Review Real Estate and Ownership
Real estate deserves its own review.
Gather current deeds and information about property you own individually, jointly, through a trust, or under another ownership arrangement.
Tell your attorney if you’ve acquired additional property since your estate plan was prepared, particularly if you’ve purchased real estate outside Missouri.
Also mention changes in how existing property is owned.
Ownership can affect how property is administered and how it interacts with other estate-planning documents.
Avoid treating the addition of another person’s name to a deed as a simple administrative shortcut. Changing title is a legal change and can have consequences beyond making the property easier for someone else to access or manage.
The same caution can apply when changing ownership of financial accounts.
Before changing title or ownership, understand what the change accomplishes and how it fits the rest of the plan.
7. Reconsider the People Carrying Out Your Plan
Estate planning isn’t only about deciding who receives property.
Your documents may name several people to important roles, such as:
- Personal representatives
- Trustees
- Financial agents
- Health care decision-makers
- Successors or alternates
Review those choices periodically.
Someone who was an excellent choice several years ago may now live far away, have significant responsibilities of their own, experience health issues, or simply no longer be the person you would choose today.
Relationships can change as well.
Consider both trust and practical availability. Depending on the role, the person may need to manage documents, communicate with family members and professionals, handle financial responsibilities, or make difficult decisions.
If appropriate, talk with the people you’ve selected so they understand that you’ve named them and have an opportunity to ask questions about the responsibility.
Look for Changes That Affect More Than One Document
One reason year-end reviews can be useful is that a single life change may affect several pieces of an estate plan.
A marriage, divorce, death, new property purchase, or change in family relationships might lead you to review a will, trust, power of attorney, beneficiary designation, and property ownership rather than changing only one document.
This is why estate planning should be considered as a coordinated system.
Updating one piece without considering the others can leave instructions that don’t work together the way you intended.
When you make your year-end list, organize changes by event as well as by document. That can make it easier to identify areas that need to be reviewed together.
Make Sure Important Documents Can Be Found
A year-end review is also a good opportunity to organize your records.
You don’t necessarily need to keep every estate-planning document in the same physical location, but the appropriate people should know how important information can be accessed when necessary.
Consider whether you can readily locate:
- Current estate-planning documents
- Trust information
- Powers of attorney
- Health care documents
- Deeds
- Insurance information
- Beneficiary confirmations
- Important financial account information
- Contact information for relevant professionals
If you discover several outdated copies of the same document, ask how they should be handled rather than creating additional confusion about which version is current.
Review Changes in Your Financial Life
Your financial picture may look different from when your estate plan was created.
You may have retired, sold a business, opened or closed accounts, purchased real estate, inherited property, or experienced another significant change.
Make a simple list of those developments.
You don’t need to prepare a complete financial statement simply to begin a conversation. The purpose is to identify changes that may affect existing planning.
Bring relevant statements or records when an attorney asks to review them.
Don’t Forget Digital and Practical Information
Modern households may also have important information that isn’t sitting in a filing cabinet.
Consider whether the appropriate people know how to identify important digital accounts, recurring payments, electronic records, or other practical information they may eventually need.
That doesn’t mean passwords should be written into estate-planning documents or casually shared.
Instead, discuss how important digital information should be addressed as part of your broader planning and organization.
When Should You Review an Estate Plan?
The end of the year provides a convenient reminder, but estate planning doesn’t need to follow the calendar.
A review may also make sense after a significant life or financial change.
Examples include:
- Marriage or divorce
- Birth or adoption
- Death of a beneficiary or person named to serve
- Significant changes in health
- Retirement
- Purchase or sale of real estate
- Opening or closing significant accounts
- Major changes in finances
- Moving to another state
- Changes in important family relationships
Even when nothing dramatic has happened, periodically checking your documents can help confirm that the people, property, and instructions still reflect your intentions.
Prepare for Your Year-End Estate Planning Review
Before meeting with an attorney, make a short list of what has changed since your plan was created or last reviewed.
Gather the documents and information most closely connected to those changes.
Your review might include:
- Financial power of attorney
- Health care documents
- Will
- Trust
- Current deeds
- Beneficiary designations
- Insurance information
- Information about newly acquired assets
- Relevant financial statements
- Questions about people named to serve
- Notes about family or financial changes
You don’t need to decide what legal changes are necessary before the meeting. Identifying what changed gives your attorney a starting point for reviewing the existing plan.
Bring the Pieces of Your Estate Plan Together
A year-end estate-planning review isn’t about changing documents simply because another year has passed.
It’s an opportunity to make sure the different pieces still reflect your circumstances and work together as intended.
Your financial power of attorney, health care documents, will, trust, beneficiary designations, property ownership, and chosen decision-makers can all play different roles. Reviewing them together can identify specific updates without assuming the entire plan needs to be replaced.
Markell Estate Planning & Elder Law can review your existing documents and help you understand whether changes in your family, property, accounts, or priorities affect your plan.
Schedule a free consultation through our O’Fallon office serving St. Charles County or our appointment-only Springfield office serving Southwest Missouri. We’ll review the circumstances, discuss any recommended next steps, and explain the proposed scope and fees before work begins.
This article provides general educational information and is not legal advice. Reading it does not create an attorney-client relationship. Estate-planning decisions depend on individual circumstances. Talk with an attorney about your specific situation.