Thinking of a DIY estate plan? AI can draft trust language. An online questionnaire can produce a will. You can read the documents, recognize the names, and see instructions that appear to match your wishes.
The harder question is whether the plan will work when someone needs to use it. Answering that requires evaluating the decisions in the documents, the decisions they leave out, and the way your assets are owned.
If you prepare a DIY estate plan without professional review, you are also deciding whether the finished plan is adequate. These are some of the questions that evaluation needs to address.
What did the tool need to ask you?
Estate planning reaches further than deciding who inherits your property. Someone may need authority to pay your bills, manage a business, or communicate with your doctors while you are alive. Your health care agent may need guidance and room to respond to circumstances you could not predict. Your first choice of decision-maker may be unable to serve, so the plan needs workable successors.
A questionnaire can record the answers you give. The difficult part is recognizing when it has not asked about a circumstance that matters to you.
That could include:
- A child who needs ongoing support
- A beneficiary facing creditor or divorce risk
- A blended family
- A business that depends on you
- A person you trust for health care decisions but would not choose to manage money
These circumstances can affect who receives authority, how an inheritance is managed, and which instructions belong in the plan. Completing every field does not establish that every important decision has been addressed.
What powers did you give, and to whom?
A broad financial power of attorney can be like creating a clone of yourself for the decisions it authorizes. That makes its scope—and your choice of agent—important.
Read beyond the person’s name. What can the agent do? When can the agent act? Does the authority fit the job you expect that person to perform?
Ask similar questions throughout the plan. Who steps in if your first choice cannot serve? How is incapacity determined? Can a successor trustee act when needed? Do your health care instructions provide useful guidance while allowing your agent to respond to the circumstances?
The documents should give people enough authority to carry out their responsibilities while respecting the limits you intend.
Will your assets follow the plan?
Carefully drafted instructions may not control property that follows another ownership or transfer arrangement. A beneficiary designation may direct an insurance policy or retirement account to someone named with the institution. Survivorship ownership may send an account or property to the surviving owner. A trust generally needs assets transferred to it or otherwise coordinated with it.
Consider an account you expect your trust to divide among your children. If you add one child as a joint owner to help with bills, the account arrangement may give that child ownership or survivorship rights you did not mean to create. The trust may never control the account.
For each significant asset, ask:
- Who owns it now?
- Who can manage it if you cannot?
- Where would it go when you die?
Then consider what happens after the first transfer. If an asset passes outright to a surviving owner or beneficiary, will that person control its eventual destination? Does that result match your intentions?
Does it fit your circumstances and your jurisdiction?
Legal wording is not proof that a document is suitable. At Cardon Law, we have reviewed documents produced through online services that referred to another state’s law, cited the wrong statutes, or even drew from another country’s law.
Those examples illustrate why the review requires more than recognizing familiar names and terms. It involves understanding what the document is trying to accomplish, checking whether its provisions work together, and applying the law to the family, assets, and goals involved.
Bringing a DIY estate plan or generated document to an attorney does not necessarily mean it can be corrected quickly. In some cases, rebuilding the plan is more efficient than repairing it one provision at a time.
What happens after signing?
A plan may require deeds, account changes, beneficiary designations, and business ownership documents to carry out its instructions. Those steps need to be identified, tracked, and completed.
Make a list of the remaining work and confirm when each task is done. A signed trust and an intention to fund it are different things.
The plan also needs attention as your circumstances change. A new child, a death, a property purchase, or a growing business may affect the decisions behind it. The person you named years ago may no longer be available or appropriate.
The difficulty with evaluating your own plan is that an important problem may be something you do not know to look for. Your loved ones may discover it when you can no longer explain or correct it.
AI and online tools can help you learn, organize information, and prepare questions. Cardon Law can help you evaluate the plan itself: the choices it makes, the authority it gives, the assets it is meant to govern, and the work needed to put it into effect.
