Why should I bother with an estate plan?

Your legacy starts now, when you’re “Alive and Well”:

Our legacy starts when we're alive and well. It's our character, it’s in the little ways we connect with others. It comes out of who we are and what tiny but important impacts we have on the world when we're here and when we're gone.
What's in it for you to avoid having a plan?

Your choice is to live a small game and die with confusion, high cost and a bureaucracy telling you what to do, versus living your life your way, passing with dignity and offering a meaningful legacy for future generations, no matter how big or little your estate is.

We each have a personal responsibility to clean up our stuff.

Until we sit down and say "This is how I want my stuff handled" - we've got this nagging piece of unfinished business still hanging on, and interrupting our peace of mind.

So even if you’re in the alive-and-well stage of life, you’re subjecting yourself to more stress by not spelling out what you want. Once you do spell this out, you'll experience a lightening of your load and will have peace of mind knowing that you've defined your preferences and taken care of this need.

Alive and not-so-well:

We have a great chance of becoming incapacitated during our life. We're living longer; but more and more that means our life has an incapacitated stage to it.

If you or your spouse were incapacitated today, who would legally sign your name? Who would legally be able to make health decisions on your behalf? Who would be your advocate to protect your wishes and enforce the instructions you set forth in your planning?

After death:

At death we have two choices: we can either acknowledge or ignore our legacy.

Sure we need to ID who gets our money and property; but our legacy is about a lot more than that.

Our legacy is about our values and the lessons we've learned in our life that we want to pass on to the next generation.

Allowing yourself to die without an estate plan is an insult to who you are and your importance here on earth. It also sends a terrible message to your loved ones and creates a situation where lawyers get rich and families lose out. Why do this?

We're all here for a short time. In that time what do we want to accomplish? What do we want to have achieved when we leave? What do we want to pass on to the next generation - what insights did we gain in our life that are important for the next generation to know?

Maybe its charities, maybe it’s your kids, maybe it’s your friends. Maybe its money, maybe it’s your personal property, maybe its a few kind words. You have a choice in what you want your life to mean, and without an estate plan, you're missing out on a huge opportunity.

Relationship going forward

If you needed an attorney today - now, who you could trust and who would be there for you, who would you call, now? We run our firm based on maintaining our client relationships long after the documents are created.

Everyone should have a relationship with a trusted source for medical, legal, financial and spiritual guidance. If you don't have a trusted legal source, call us.

We’re The Heartland Planning Group, Ltd.: Mike Nolan and Marty Fogarty, Attorneys at law. We want to serve you and your family for years to come. Visit us in Glenview at 2222 Chestnut, Suite 201. Testimonials online at: www.heartlandplanning.com