Should You DIY Your Estate Plan? The Risks of Doing It Yourself
- Jan 28, 2025
- 2 min read
Updated: May 18
Should I DIY my estate plan?
Why shouldn't you do the estate plan yourself? In doing this full time, after working with many, many families, there's an important thing to consider, the unknown unknowns. These are the questions that you don't know to even ask, and if you don't know that they're out there, how can you create an estate plan that will answer it?
That's actually the feedback we get most often from our clients. Education is an important part of the estate planning process. Through education, our clients are empowered to make decisions and answer questions that they didn't even know were out there. In our initial meeting, we'll go over all of your questions, and then we'll ask a lot of questions too. Once we get to the end of all those questions, there's an estate plan that covers pretty much every contingency for your family and your assets. That's the most important part of estate planning with an attorney, it's not the legal document itself, it's the advice and counsel that you get in that relationship.
When a legal professional understands your objectives, your concerns, your family and your assets, you can have peace of mind that your estate plan is going to do what you need to do and protect your family when you need it. An online estate plan is often worse than doing nothing. It can also provide a false sense of security to someone who wants to protect their family but doesn't know how I strongly recommend that you consult with an attorney to complete your estate plan and to protect everyone you love in every league. Estate planning is more than just signing a legal document. If it was that simple, I would send you online. There's a whole lot more to it. It's your future, children's future and your legacy involved, and it's work doing right.
