Estate Planning Tips

Video Transcript

"This is financial adviser Patrick Munro, talking about estate planning tips. Basically you need to make sure that you have a court document, a will, as a foundation piece for your estate plan. Your family is the beneficiaries of everything that you do in life. If you're married your spouse will be the surviving beneficiary and your children will be the contingent beneficiary. So you want to make sure that their interests are protected. And the way to do that is to make sure that you have the appropriate paperwork to make sure that this is done. You want to make sure that the titling of your beneficiaries is done correctly as well on each of your financial instruments. That includes certificates of deposit, stocks and securities, mutual fund, IRA, 401k statements. All of it that at the time of your death, the people that you wanted to get that money, will in fact get it. It's also important that if you have a sizable amount of money, that you may put things in a family trust. There are various types of family trusts, to make sure that the taxation upon your estate at the time of your death, will be minimal. If you don't have these appropriate documents in place, then of course you do have taxation issues to deal with and so do your beneficiaries at the time of your demise. So these are important estate planning tips that we're talking about today. I'm financial planner Patrick Munro."