The documents you incorporate into your Estate Plan should work together to accomplish a variety of inter-related goals. A single outdated document, however, can cause the entire plan to fall apart. Common examples of how outdated Estate planning documents can wreak havoc on your estate plan include:

• Last Will & Testament– Failing to update your Will could lead to assets being left out, causing you to unintentionally leave behind an intestate estate. It could also result in assets being gifted to someone you no longer wanted to inherit from your estate, such as an ex-spouse
• Trust Agreement– A common mistake is to appoint a Trustee when a Trust Agreement is created, and you then forget about the entire agreement. If that Trustee dies or becomes incapacitated, and you fail to update the Trust Agreement, someone you did not choose could end up managing the Trust assets.
• Life Insurance Policies & Retirement Accounts– Failing to review beneficiaries of a life insurance policy or retirement account can result in a beneficiary not of your choosing inheriting the assets held in the account.
• Advanced Directives– Choosing your Agent in an Advance Directive lets you decide who will make healthcare decisions for you if you cannot make them. Forgetting to update that document might mean the wrong person ends up making those decisions.
• Power of Attorney- If you forget to review and revise (or terminate) a Power of Attorney, you could unintentionally leave someone with considerable authority over your assets.

Although there is no hard and fast rule, we have learned that there is a major life event about every three years that will impact or change your Estate Plan.  Sometimes, this occurs in the first year, and other times in the second or third year.  We have been tracking this trend for nearly twenty years at our Firm, and it is quasi-universally true. 

For a business owner, this seems to be doubly the case.  A business owner will often experience a major life event in his or her business life that will rarely coincide with a major life event in his or her personal life. 

For these reasons, we strongly recommend that everyone revisits their Estate Plan every 18 months to see if there is any change that has occurred.  For a business owner, we recommend that he or she revisits the Estate Plan every 9 months to a year to see what has changed.