You’ve now made the decision to have your estate planning documents prepared. You may still have several questions about the process involved. Who should assist you in the preparation? How long will it take? How much time and effort will it take?
Kinetic Legal Services can assist with your estate planning needs. With personalized service and flat-free pricing, the process is simple, straightforward, and low stress.
If you hire Kinetic Legal Services to prepare your estate planning documents, here’s what you can expect. The process can be broken into 3 steps:
- The initial consultation;
- The preparation/drafting of the documents;
- The final signing meeting.
When you contact Kinetic Legal Services, I will set up a meeting with you at a convenient time and location for an initial consultation. This initial consultation will take 1 to 1 ½ hours. During this meeting, I will go through a questionnaire with you to obtain your contact information, personal circumstances, financial situation, and instructions for the documents. You can take a look at the Will questionnaire here.
After the initial consultation, I will prepare a draft of the documents. It will take approximately 1 week for me to prepare the draft documents. If you are on a short timeline, I can make arrangements to have the documents prepared sooner. Once the documents are drafted, I will send you copies of the drafts to review. After your review, I will set up an appointment with you for the final signing meeting.
Usually, the final signing meeting is scheduled approximately 2 weeks after the initial consultation. However, this timeline can be shortened or lengthened as needed. At the final signing meeting, we review the documents and proceed to signing. This meeting will take approximately 1 hour. In order to have the Will properly executed, there must be 2 witnesses who are present at the time of signing the documents. The 2 witnesses cannot be anyone listed in the documents or a spouse of a person listed in the documents. It is best if the 2 witnesses are friends or neighbors.
Once the documents are signed, I will provide the original documents to you in a convenient package for storage in a safe location (i.e. fire proof safe or safety deposit box). I do not store original estate planning documents at my office. In addition to the signed originals, you will receive scanned copies of the original documents in PDF format for your records.
I recommend that you review your estate planning documents once per year to ensure that the documents accurately reflect your wishes. In the future, if your circumstances change and you need to update the documents, I can quickly and easily arrange for the updates with my electronic record keeping and paper-less office.
At the end of the process, a lot of clients are quite surprised at how easy it is, the minimal time involved, and the minimal work involved on their part. Clients often wonder why they did not have the documents prepared sooner.
With this new-found knowledge of the estate planning documents and the standard process involved in order to have the documents prepared, I hope that everyone will take the necessary steps to have the documents prepared.
This blog post is the last post in this series of The Basics of Estate Planning.
All the best,
Crystal Schening
