Estate Planning is the “core” or “central” piece of proper planning. A complete estate plan is several documents that work together to take care of you and your spouse, and to allow trusted people such as your spouse, siblings, or adult children to have the legal authority to make decisions for you. 

Our Elder Focus Magazine takes you through each of several different documents and explains the purpose of each document so that you can see how they all work together to protect you.

We want our clients to be informed.

It’s not uncommon for clients to come to us with documents from another attorney, and the clients have no idea of how the documents work, and don’t understand what the documents say.  Their documents are often wrong, but the client simply didn’t understand the meaning of their own documents.  The clients were unaware of what happens if they’re incapacitated, and what happens when the first spouse dies.  And, in some cases, the documents weren’t even prepared by a qualified attorney, and the estate plan is just a ticking time bomb waiting to explode.

One elder client said that the estate planning people came to her home to update things frequently. Yes, of course they did!  They were insurance agents and they kept coming because they kept selling her new insurance products.  She was totally snookered by these scammers!

Another client came to me to do his third estate plan.  He admitted to me that until he attended one of my seminars, he had never understood why he had both a will and a trust, and he didn’t know the difference between the two.   This man was a highly educated and highly compensated executive, and he had paid two other attorneys to prepare his prior estate plans over the last twelve years, but he never knew how those plans worked.  Those attorneys never explained things to him, and he was too embarrassed to ask them to explain.

If you have a house, spouse, investments, or children, you generally need a trust and the several associated documents that go with it.  The different goals are to (1) take care of you if you’re incapacitated, (2) be clear about who can make your health and financial decisions if you’re deceased or incapacitated, (3) avoid probate, (4) be clear about the final distribution of your assets following your death, and (5) avoid unnecessary taxes wherever possible.  Our Elder Focus Magazine describes the different documents that most people should have, and we’ve tried to present things in a clear and entertaining manner.

You can call us and pick up a hard copy at one of our offices, or you can often find them at many of the hospitals, senior centers, and nursing homes throughout Santa Clara County, or you can just read if here on this website or click to jump to the the Law Offices of James A. Ward and read it there.