Putting an Estate Plan in Place in Just One Week

5 Steps for Setting Up an Estate Plan in One Week

At WAEPA, we want to help you ease into this difficult transition with as much ease as possible. If you want to learn more about how you can prepare or take care of any of the steps necessary to set up any plans or transferal of funds, contact our team today. To help get you started, here are five steps to help you set up a thorough and efficient estate plan in just one week.

1. Make Plans for Organ Donations and Contact Family Members

Organ donation can be a finicky process, and depending on how your loved one passed, they could easily help save a life if they elected to do so. If they passed away in a hospital, the facility will move quickly to facilitate your loved one’s wishes, but if they passed away outside of a medical facility plans will need to be made quickly in order for the organ donation process to take place. Once those plans have taken place, you need to notify as many friends and family members as you possibly can. Notifying the family will help you establish a support network while also helping you divide the responsibilities as necessary. We recommend that you either write an email or send out a text to everyone that you think would be interested, so that responsibilities are clearly laid out and documented.

2. Gather Important Documents

This process can easily get overwhelming, and if you are scrambling to find the proper documentation through it all, you will find yourself getting flustered. You can make this process easier on you and the rest of your family by gathering all the important documents necessary for this process to function. You will need the following documents for a variety of things to come:

3. Make Funeral Preparations

Making preparations for a funeral will be very difficult, but it is important to try to take care of this as soon as possible. Start by finding a venue and setting a date with them. Once you have a date and a time set, the rest of the process will fall into place ranging from flowers to speakers and casket options.

4. Notify the Post Office

This may seem like an unnecessary step, but your loved one is going to continue to receive incoming mail. Notify the post office of a forwarding address so that you can get all of the incoming mail sent straight to you or someone you trust so that no important legal documents or sentimental letters get lost.

5. Close All Accounts & Notify Social Security

You then need to liquefy all of the accounts that your loved one had so that assets can be allocated appropriately. You can work out certain things like property and vehicles with your siblings (if it was your parent who passed, for instance) so that not everything needs to be liquidated, but if you are going to do this, you need it to be done by either a moderator or the executor of the will. You also need to notify social security as their spouse or children could receive payments in their place.