Estate plan review for real estate investors: How often?

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How often should an estate plan review for real estate investors be completed? This includes a look at the full estate plan, wills, shareholder agreements, partnership agreements, and so on. There may not be a technically correct answer, but watch and learn some guidelines to that can prevent major headaches for your estate.

Video Transcript: Estate plan review: How often?

How often should you be reviewing your estate plan, wills, shareholder agreements, partnership agreements, et cetera?

I’m George Dube, saving the world from tax, one bow tie at a time.

I don’t know that there’s a technically correct answer but I would heavily suggest when there’s changes to major life events such as marriages, deaths, divorces, separations, these are important to now take some time to reflect, is this plan that we created, perhaps 20 years ago, still relevant today? Does it need to be tweaked?

Estate plans, wills, shareholder agreements, and partnership agreements—how often should you review them? While there's no definitive answer, I strongly advise revisiting them after life events like marriages, births, deaths, and divorces, and business milestones. Otherwise every 5 years. — Estate plans, wills, shareholder agreements, and partnership agreements—how often should you review them? While there’s no definitive answer, I strongly advise revisiting them after life events like marriages, births, deaths, and divorces, and business milestones. Otherwise every 5 years.

I’ve worked in more than one case where I’ve seen the wills and they reflected a former spouse and that former spouse received everything. I’m quite confident that was not the intention but there wasn’t updates, the planning that should have been completed. The same applies to former business partners.

The same applies, we’ve touched on before, being too rigid. And I’ve had a case, and I’m sure more than one case, but I one just jumps to mind, where the parents decided they didn’t want their child to receive anything from the estate. Exactly what drove them to that? I don’t know. However, I was trying to create for them the opportunity should things change in the future, there was an ability to get to, if not that generation or grandchildren. And not that I could force it of course, but time tends to heal some wounds as compared to permanently putting in place a rigid plan, in this particular example, it was being donated to a particular charity.

Give some thought, one, in terms of overly rigid plans. And two, ensuring that you’ve updated that plan on a periodic basis. So as you can see, it’s really important to update that estate plan on a periodic basis, or you may be leaving your family with a nasty little surprise.

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