Book Review of

Plan Your Estate

Everything You Need to Know About : Living Trusts, Estate-Tax Saving Trusts, Charitable Trusts, Spendthrift Trusts...

Author : Denis Clifford and Cora Jordan

Pros : Good, thorough look into estate planning.

Cons : Pushes living trusts a little too hard. A few numerical errors.

Grade : B+ Excellent guide to estate planning, but not a do-it-yourself book.

Contents : Jump to review...

Introduction
1. Personal Concerns and Estate Planning
2. An Overview of Estate Planning
3. State Property Ownership Laws
4. Inventorying Your Property
5. Beneficiaries - Deciding Who Gets Your Property
6. Children
7. Probate and Why You Want to Avoid It
8. Chart : Probate Avoidance Methods
9. Revocable Living Trusts
10. Joint Tenancy and Tenancy by the Entirety
11. Pay-on-Death Designations
12. Life Insurance
13. State Law Exemptions From Normal Probate
14. Wills
15. Estate Taxes
16. Gifts and Gift Taxes
17. An Overview of Ongoing Trusts
18. Estate Tax-Saving Bypass Trusts
19. Other Estate Tax-Saving Marital Trusts
20. Charitable Trusts
21. Other Estate Tax-Saving Trusts
22. Disclaimers : After-Death Estate Tax Planning
23. Trusts for Subsequent Marriages
24. Trusts and Other Devices for Imposing Controls Over Property
25. Combining Ongoing Trusts
26. Incapacity : Health Care and Financial Management Trusts
27. Body Organ Donation, Funerals and Burials
28. Business Ownership and Estate Planning
29. Social Security and Pensions
30. Using Lawyers
31. After Your Estate Plan Is Completed
32. After a Death Occurs
33. Some Estate Plans
Glossary
Appendix : State Death Tax Rules

Review :

"Plan Your Estate" is a good and comprehensive guide to estate planning. The book is now in its third printing, so the author has been covering the topic for a while. The author also has several other how-to publications on writing a will or creating a living trust.

It's important to be aware of these other publications, because "Plan Your Estate" is not a do-it-yourself book. You won't find canned, boilerplate wills or living trust documents that you might expect to find in a Nolo book. Instead, "Plan Your Estate" covers strategies on how to plan all aspects of your estate, including creating property control trusts for beneficiaries and using trusts to reduce estate taxes.

The book is very comprehensive, and generally much better than another book, "ABA Guide to Wills and Estates". For example, "Plan Your Estate" provides fairly detailed information on bypass trusts, GRITs, GRATs, GRUTs, state property ownership laws, life insurance trusts, charitable trusts and other topics like health care power of attorney. You can test the effects of some of theses strategies with our estate tax calculator.

The book also covers probate, and probate avoidance. This is where I have a minor problem with the book. The author apparently lives in California, where probating an estate has a bad reputation. In California or some other states, probate avoidance is probably a good idea. But I think the author tries too hard to steer people into setting up a living trust for probate avoidance. A more balanced approach would be preferred. The book also suffers from a few numerical errors in a few of the example calculations.

Finally, the book doesn't miss a chance to try to sell other Nolo books and software. This can be expected to a degree, but do we really need two references to Nolo's title "Dog Law" in a book on estate planning?

Still, this is a good thorough book well worth the price.

Reviewed by David Luhman, MBA, EA

Published 1996 by Nolo Press. ISBN 0-87337-239-5
Length : approx. 360 pages.