070: Can you do estate planning online

Can you do estate planning online?

Transcript

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Can you do estate planning online? Well, sure. There's a lot of online services out there right now that will allow you to do your estate plan with them. And usually the cost is substantially cheaper than what we would charge or what an estate planning attorney would charge you to do your estate plan. A lot of times you get what you pay for, just like I talked about in our last video, you can do a DIY, do it yourself estate plan, but you really need to be careful and you really need to be aware of what needs to go into a estate plan so that you cover all the bases or cover as much of the bases as possible. The trouble with online estate plans and there are some good ones out there, you see them advertise on TV, TV all the time, but the trouble with them is they are usually national companies who put together a very basic kind of one size fits all estate plan for everybody in the United States. There's a lot of difference in laws between California and Texas and Oklahoma and Florida and New York especially. So you really have to be careful about what you're doing when you use an online service not only that, you also need to make sure that you are, if you do use one, that you are adhering to the signing and the attestation and the witness and the notary requirements in your particular jurisdiction to make certain that your estate plan that you downloaded from the Internet is actually going to be valid. Can you do an estate plan online? Absolutely. And in some situations, again, like I talked about in the last video, if you have a very, very small estate, that might be a great solution. If you're just needing a will because you have a small estate. But if your estate plan is like most Americans who have a house, who have a bank account, who have kids, who have automobiles, maybe a rental property or maybe a vacation house, retirement investments, then you really need to at least speak with an estate planning attorney and get their assessment of what you need for your estate plan. Because the worst thing that can happen about doing an estate plan on your own is doing it completely wrong and end up costing your estate either during your lifetime or after you pass away thousands of extra dollars because it was not done correctly. Property was not titled correctly or beneficiary designations were not made correctly. There's a ton of things that can go wrong. The bottom line is, yes, you can get your estate plan online, but just like in doing a DIY, do it yourself estate plan, you're going to get what you paid for. And in a lot of cases, it could cost your estate thousands of dollars more for an attorney or for a court to have to fix your estate plan later on. So proceed with caution.