People don’t like to think about the fact that they will one day die. Because of this, they are often slow or reluctant to deal with important legal matters like arranging their Will and making sure that family members understand their wishes for when the time comes. Failing to prepare these things can have a dire cost to the people that you leave behind, however. If your estate has to go through Probate in Murrieta, the costs will be far higher than what you could have spent on having everything dealt with properly in advance.
Our legal system is designed with default mechanisms that we use to divide up an estate when the deceased hasn’t expressed any clear wishes about what should happen. This is designed to ensure that the people presumed to be closest to the one who’s passed on, such as immediate family members, are the ones who end up inheriting. There is a complicated legal process involved in actually accounting for everything and then dividing it up, however. The courts take these matters seriously and handle them with care. The end result of it all is that the people who are inheriting can end up losing out on many thousands of dollars that are diverted to cover the probate costs.
Your estate doesn’t have to end up going through probate, however. Or, at the very least, you can prepare documents that make it simpler and faster to track all of your assets down and to divide them up. With the right documentation, for example, you can have your assets in a trust that will transfer into someone else’s care immediately upon your death. This is a particularly good step to take if you have dependents who will be relying on your money to survive, since they might otherwise be left with absolutely nothing for the duration of the probate process.
Contacting a Legal Document Assistant is the best way to get started on your estate planning. These are licensed and bonded professionals, but they have less training and are therefore dramatically less expensive in general than speaking to a lawyer. They can help you with the basic forms, and assist you in determining whether your situation is simple enough to handle in this way or if you truly do need to retain an attorney to handle a portion of your estate planning.
