E-mail me at
teleice@TrustsAndEstates.net

Clicking the Iceberg Will Always Take You Home.

What does a good estate plan cost? It depends. Personally, I think that some of the more expensive plans ($50,000 and up), being marketed by nonlawyers primarily, are a bit overpriced, or perhaps not, depending on value received. Doing a good job takes time, as well as knowledge and years of experience. Nevertheless, $5000 can purchase a very good basic estate plan, and, I have done many for much less. A more comprehensive and sophisticated plan will obviously cost more. I have tried to break down what is involved in an approximate fee schedule that is on this site.

My Five Year Plan-Benefits to Fellow Lawyers Who Are Website Visitors

My Five Year Client Plan

My plan is to have available in the next couple of years a complete basic estate planning form system and a charitable planned giving form system for attorneys. I will probably distribute these on CD for a very modest price, say $99-$149, complete with annotations and kept current annually. The forms will be simple to use. The basic approach will be to employ bracketed variables that can be replaced globally. I will generate these forms (or templates) using a data base and MS Merge. The system I will use to generate the forms is frankly too complicated for most people to use, which has always been a problem. However, by using the power of the data base to generate the form, that complication is invisible to the end user of the form. What I have come to realize is that end product of my complicated data base Word Merge system can itself be used as a form, if special form fields are used as fields in the data base to produce bracketed variables suitable for global replacement. An example of the first form I have generated this way is the IRA Beneficiary Designation Form (just strip the footnotes). The E.C. and Lotta Money documents that were prepared for various State Bar of Texas Advanced Estate Planning Courses also give an idea of what I have in mind in the future. These particular forms should be helpful to attorneys now, but they are already slightly dated. I hope that lawyers familiar with my work, in part because they have visited this website, will have the confidence and interest to support this CD form book I have in mind.

In over a quarter century of estate planning work, I have found that no two families are alike enough to fit one mold, and that no matter how much the estate planning field becomes form driven, no form will ever replace the judgment of a competent and experienced attorney. Nevertheless, I intend that by developing the forms and systems, described in the left hand column, to become more and more proficient and efficient in the preparation of estate planning and planned giving documents, to the end of being able to quickly respond to and address the needs of each individual family or other client who comes to me seeking assistance, all at a realistic and competitive cost, but allowing for as much time as is needed to tailor the plan to fit the situation. My goal is that once the horrendous task of simply managing the paper work has been solved, more time can be devoted to the bigger picture, resulting in a more useful and effective estate plan, and one that is financially satisfying to both me and my clients.