Is your estate plan—or lack of one—setting your family up for unnecessary expense and stress after you’re gone? Losing a loved one is already hard enough without the added burden of complicated or outdated documents. The good news: you can save your family significant time, money, and frustration by getting the right guidance now from a qualified professional, ideally an attorney who can draft or update your estate documents.

As an Accredited Estate Planner, I’ve reviewed hundreds of estate plans. One of the most common problems I see involves dated “credit shelter” trusts—once a go-to strategy for wealthy families before 2011. Back then, these trusts helped minimize estate taxes. But times have changed. Today, with a combined federal estate and gift tax exemption exceeding $14 million per couple, very few families benefit from these outdated trusts.

In fact, older trusts often create new challenges. These trusts can be:

• Expensive and inconvenient to administer.
• Legally complex, requiring a separate trustee, tax ID number, and annual tax return.
• Restrictive, limiting the surviving spouse’s control over assets.
• IncomeTax traps, since they reach the highest tax rate at the lowest income level and can increase heirs’ capital gains.

If your trust was drafted years ago, now is the time to act. Tennessee law allows professionals to modify or even eliminate these outdated trusts—even after a person has passed away. Modern estate planning documents can simplify administration, reduce taxes, and ensure that assets receive a valuable “step-up in basis” when the surviving spouse dies.

My advice: This topic is just the tip of the iceberg. It’s almost always painless—and extremely worthwhile—to have your will, trust, and related documents reviewed. I offer a free 30-minute consultation to help you get started.

For most couples, I can prepare a revocable living trust–based estate plan for an average of $2,500. More specialized plans—for example, those involving a beneficiary with special needs—may require additional planning.