Now, I'm going to go out on a limb here and state that roughly 9 out of 10 clients who finally sign their estate planning documents put their pens down and proclaim to their attorney, "We feel wonderful! You're not going to believe this, but we have been putting this off for years!!" I'll bet you that every estate planning attorney in Connecticut and beyond will back me up on this one. Estate planning is just one of those things that clients love to put on the back burner, and it doesn't matter what the size of their estate is, how old they are, or how many children they have running around the house. Pursuading my clients to get the ball rolling on their estate planning has always been one of my biggest challenges as an attorney. And it's an even bigger challenge to get clients to start Medicaid planning! But that's a whole other issue for another post.
So...what exactly is the cause of this strange phenomenon? I actually think that it can be best explained by Stephen Covey's "7 Habits of Highly Effective People" and that famous quadrant theory of his. To paraphrase the theory, everyone has a long list of tasks, each of which fall into one of four quadrants. One of those quadrants is for tasks that are "important", but not "urgent". Estate planning falls squarely into this quadrant.
I think it's safe to say that there is universal agreement in our society that getting your estate planning in order (or keeping it updated) is vitally important. All parents of young children know it's important to have guardians appointed in case something unexpected happens. Everyone with very large estates know that they are walking tax liabilities. And just about everyone knows that if they die without proper estate planning in place then they will leave their loved ones with administrative chaos of epic proportions and enormous, long-lasting headaches. There are very few people who would argue with any of these statements.
So why don't most people get their estate planning in order? Because we all know it's "important", but we don't think it's "urgent". In other words, there's no known deadline (a very appropriate term). When I meet with new clients to discuss estate planning and they say that they have had genuine intentions to do this for quite some time, I happily inform them that they have beaten the deadline. I usually get quizzical looks, so I explain that it's not too late because they haven't died yet. This comment usually produces some laughs, but it's true. Technically speaking, the deadline for completing your estate planning is the day you die. The problem is that we just don't know when that deadline is! The actuaries can make a very educated guess, but no one knows for sure. One of the reasons that there was such a big surge in estate planning after September 11th is that people realized that there was a possibility that they might not live quite as long as they thought they would.
So here's the message for the day: stop procrastinating with your estate planning and sit down with an attorney, whether it's me or someone else, and get it done now in order to ensure that you beat the "deadline".
