Rebecca Rosenberger Smolen, left, and Amy Neifeld Shkedy, right, of Bala Law Group.
Being estate planners, we meet with many individuals, couples and families, each with a different set of family dynamics. In our various meetings, it’s always a pleasure when we meet with happily married couples. In fact, one of the questions we have listed in our estate planning questionnaire is “state of marriage.” The purpose of this question actually has nothing to do with whether or not a married couple is on solid ground or if the marriage is on the rocks. Rather, the question is meant to find out whether the couple was married in the commonwealth of Pennsylvania, the state of New Jersey or perhaps a community property state like California. But it always makes us smile when, every once in a while, a client fills out the answer to that question by writing something like “happy” or “great marriage.”
For many of those happily married couples, particularly those with long-lasting marriages, they initially ask us to prepare wills that would leave their assets outright to the surviving spouse (often referred to as “I Love You Wills”). Although I Love You Wills make sense in certain situations, a part of our job as estate planners is to ensure that our clients understand the consequences of these types of outright plans, and whether an alternate approach may be more appropriate, as it oftentimes is.
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