The annual review nobody schedules

Estate plans are treated as projects rather than as arrangements requiring maintenance, which is why so many of them describe a household that no longer exists.

The checklist

What to actually look at, once a year.

The people. Is everyone named still alive, willing, capable and appropriate — executor, trustee, guardians, agents under powers of attorney, beneficiaries?

Have any successors become the primary through the death or unavailability of the first choice?

The beneficiary designations. Every account and policy, confirmed with the institution rather than from memory.

Primary and contingent on each.

The overall allocation. Model who actually receives what, in what proportions, under the current arrangements.

This is the step that reveals the mismatches, and almost nobody performs it.

New accounts. Anything opened during the year without a designation, which is the most common gap.

Trust funding. Whether assets acquired during the year have been titled correctly.

A refinanced property is a frequent culprit, since refinancing can take a home out of a trust and nobody puts it back.

The documents themselves. Still accessible, still in the right place, and the people who need copies still have them.

Changes in circumstances. Marriage, divorce, birth, death, relocation, business changes, health changes, or a beneficiary's situation altering.

Changes in law. Particularly relevant given recent changes to inherited retirement account rules and scheduled changes to exemption amounts.

When to involve an attorney

Most annual reviews are self-administered and require no professional involvement.

An attorney review is worth arranging every three to five years, and immediately where any of the following applies.

A move to another state. A marriage or divorce. The death of a spouse or a named fiduciary. A significant change in assets. A change in a beneficiary's circumstances. A business transaction. Or a change in the law affecting the plan's structure.

Where a trust names a beneficiary of a retirement account, a review against current distribution rules is overdue for most people who have not done it since those rules changed.

Making it happen

The practical difficulty is that nothing prompts it.

A fixed date works — a birthday, the start of a year, alongside the tax return.

Keeping the master document in one place, with the previous year's version, makes the comparison quick.

Doing it with a spouse means both people understand the arrangements, which matters given that one of them will eventually be dealing with it alone.

The master document

What the review maintains.

Every account and institution, with approximate value and how it passes.

Every policy.

Property, with title details.

Professional contacts.

Where original documents are held.

How digital access is provided.

Recurring obligations and subscriptions.

This is the single most useful document an executor can be left, and it is produced almost entirely by the annual review.

What the review catches

The specific things that go wrong silently.

A former spouse still named on an old retirement account.

A named executor who has moved abroad.

A guardian nomination naming grandparents who are now in their eighties.

An account opened three years ago with no beneficiary at all.

A trust that owns nothing because the assets were never transferred.

A power of attorney from a state you no longer live in.

A charitable bequest to an organisation that no longer exists.

None of these announces itself, and each is discovered at the point when it cannot be fixed.

The five-minute version

For anyone who will not do the full exercise.

Log into each financial institution and check the beneficiary shown.

That alone catches the majority of what goes wrong, and it is the item with the highest consequence relative to effort in the whole of estate planning.

Doing it with a spouse

Worth insisting on.

In most couples one person handles this, and statistically that person may not be the one who lives longest.

A survivor who has never seen the accounts, does not know which institutions hold what, and has no relationship with the professionals faces a substantial task at the worst possible moment.

Walking through the master document together once a year addresses this entirely, and it takes twenty minutes.

It also means both people can confirm that the arrangements still reflect what they both want, which is not always the case.

General information only, not legal advice. Consult a qualified estate attorney about your own circumstances.