Sometimes Telling Your Family Is Wrong
I am an advocate of open estate planning, meaning I feel more families should communicate openly about their estate plan. I believe that explaining your plan can reduce and relieve some of the bickering that occurs in a family after death when the plan is discovered.
However, there is no right answer for every family. In this article, Val Farmer discusses open planning and shares how open planning resulted in bickering before the death. Unfortunately, openness only served to advance the bickering before the death.
I suppose keeping the estate plan secret can be succesful because it will tend to influence potential heirs to keep treating the benefactor civily so they do not get written out of the will. And, conversely, the potential heirs will not harrass the benefactor because they do not know they have already been written out of the will.
Val Farmer tells of three cases along the preceeding themes. In one case of hostility, a daughter married outside of her mother's church and objected to her mother's faith. Her mother gave 25% to her church in the will and then told her daughter about it.
The daughter constantly harassed her mother about the Will for the last 15 years of her life, even to the point of withholding visits from her only grandchildren.
It would have been better for the daughter to discover, after her mother’s death that her mother continued to support the faith of her fathers. The mother would have had a much more peaceful final 15 years of her life and would have been able to see her grandchildren more.
So, there is no perfect answer. While I am still an advocate of open planning, I concede that in some situations openness may only serve to increase the strife and bickering. As with every decision, I discuss the possibility with my clients and leave the decision to them.
I firmly believe that in almost every case, a well informed client will make the right decision for them. Consequently, my role is to ensure my clients are well informed when they choose.
