Chris A Owens

I met with her to discuss how to set up my estate so as to minimize the expense and difficulty to my heirs of distributing it after my death. She pushed me away from establishing a living trust (from the start of the interview, without fully understanding my situation; when that's exactly what such a... trust is for). She encouraged me to put all my assets into the will rather than simply designating beneficiaries where possible, such as for mutual fund accounts, using the argument that it would be easier to modify the will if I needed to change the beneficiary designations (which would require a lawyer) than to manage the beneficiary designations which would only require about 20 minutes for me to log on to the various web sites and would cost me nothing. From my own later research, I believe the fee for handling the estate would be capped at a certain percentage of the value of the estate, so that by distributing assets directly, an estate lawyer's potential fee would be significantly reduced. Finally (and notwithstanding an hour spent with me to understand my situation and goals), she refused to estimate a range of costs for handling the estate. She first answered my question on cost by quoting only the court fees for probate. When I asked whether those included lawyer's fees and was told no, she said "there's no way to know" what the fee would be. I suspect that when one does estate planning for a living and is holding in one's hand a list of the assets that comprise the estate, then yes, it is in fact possible to estimate a range of costs. So in all I got very little value out of the several hundred dollars charged for the consultation.