Many Houston residents may have sent off their children to college this fall and in between wondering how quickly time passes and how they are going to change the extra bedroom into a gym, they neglect to think about essential updates to their estate plan. When a child is born, parents likely update their estate plans to nominate a guardian for them in case something happened to the parents. Now that the children are older, there are a new set of issues an estate plan should consider, including how to continue financially supporting a child without letting other people take advantage of them.
One way to do this is by creating a trust. A trust can distribute one’s estate over time, preventing them from using the money all at once or getting taken advantage of by someone else. Additionally, it can provide for reasonable expenditures to be covered while precluding distributions for unreasonable expenses. Assets in a trust are also protected from the decedent’s creditors.
Not only should parents be thinking about their own estate plans when a child goes off to college, but also consider their adult child’s estate plan as well. Where previously a parent could make all the medical decisions for their child without a second though, this is no longer legally possible. This is why creating a power of attorney, either a healthcare one or a general one, is important. It can allow the nominated person to make financial or healthcare decisions on behalf of an incapacitated person.
A parent’s job is to take care of their children, regardless of his or her age and even after the parent has passed on. A proper estate plan could be the way to do that and an experienced attorney may be able to help Texas residents update theirs.