I saw this quote from George Clooney, who gave $1million to each of 14 friends a few years ago:
“I’ve slept on their couches when I was broke. They loaned me money when I was broke. They helped me when I needed help over the years. And I’ve helped them over the years. We’re all good friends,” he says. “And I thought, you know, without them I don’t have any of this. And we’re all really close, and I just thought basically if I get hit by a bus, they’re all in the will. So why the f—- am I waiting to get hit by a bus?”
What a kind and generous thing to do for his friends!
Few of us can be so kind and generous with our friends while we are here. What we can do, however, is to make sure we take care of them before we get hit by that bus.
We should have in place a will (and maybe a trust to go with it), a living will, a medical power of attorney, other advance directives, and a financial power of attorney.
The cost of being prepared need not be as much as you think! My website has pricing for these documents, as well as for other services.
If you have already done your estate planning, you should dig those papers out of your files and look for any changes you want to make. The cost of changes, by a codicil or amendment or addendum, is much less than your original estate plan.
If you don’t want to spend the money to review the estate plan, for example to see if the document works in Colorado, or what is needed to make it work, you can limit the work I do for you to just making those changes.
Having said that, I do recommend a half hour of my time looking at the document and translating those parts of it that you might not understand. You may start out wanting only one change, but then realize there are other things that need to be tweaked.