Meeting With Our Lawyer Wednesday - Updating Our Wills

Oct 22 2007

Posted by NCN as Family, Insurance |

My wife and I have two children and another baby on the way. We both have wills - but we are taking our wills to our lawyer Wednesday so that he can look them over and make any changes or improvements that might be necessary. We will also be discussing other “end-of-life” documents that we might need. After our meeting on Wednesday, I’ll fill you all in on what he thinks we need to do.

I have also begun to shop for more term life insurance. With the new baby on the way, our baby-related expenses will be going up by 50%! I want to be sure that my wife and kids will be taken care of - just in case something were to happen to me.

6 Responses

Chief Family Officer

October 22nd, 2007 at 12:00 pm
1

I am all for updating your will and getting more life insurance. But if I recall correctly, you can’t really put the baby into your will until after s/he is born, so I would wait to make any changes til after the birth (that way you don’t have to pay your lawyer twice) - though as long as he isn’t charging you for the meeting, it’s a great idea to go.
NCN

October 22nd, 2007 at 12:25 pm
2

CFO… It’s my understanding that I don’t have to “add” individual kids.. the will should be structured so that all of our kids will be “covered”… I’ll check into that while I’m there, though…
NCN
RR

October 22nd, 2007 at 12:49 pm
3

Curious about how your child-related expenses will go up by 50%…

and yes, a properly structured will should allow for more children to be born. Unless, that is, you want to disinherit one of them:-).

Keep us updated on the term life insurance search!
NCN

October 22nd, 2007 at 12:52 pm
4

RR - I have 2 kids now… adding another makes 3… and that’s 50% more than 2!
NCN
James

October 22nd, 2007 at 5:12 pm
5

My wife and I had another child on October 4th and we are looking at doing our first wills. We have been torn between attempting to do it ourselves using something like USLEGALFORMS online or going to a lawyer. I would be interested to know what folks are paying at a lawyer’s office for this service. I am leaning more and more toward going to a lawyer for the service just because it appears to be something to important to have a major loophole in.
Chief Family Officer

October 26th, 2007 at 4:57 pm
6

NCN - It’s not so much “adding” a kid as putting the kid’s name in there. I think the wording in both our will and our trust is “Alex and Tyler and all other children” or something like that (sorry, I don’t have time to dig out the documents right now). But we did want to have Tyler’s name in there for clarity, just so no one could say that our intent changed after he was born. Plus we did make a few changes in terms of distribution and guardianship.

@James - As attorneys ourselves, my husband and I never considered *not* going to an attorney who specializes in estate planning. For us it was easy, because we went straight to my husband’s Wills & Trusts professor, who also happens to be a good friend of his dad. He gave us a 50% discount, which worked out to $300, if I recall correctly - and I’m sure that most attorneys would readily give you a discount if you’re not doing anything complicated. It’s easy work for them, after all, since they do it all the time. Come to think of it, I don’t think our attorney even charged us for the revision we did after Tyler was born.