Bluffton South Carolina Estate Planning Law Blog

Ideally, a South Carolina resident will form an estate plan before they become ill or pass away. However, it can be difficult to bring up the subject of money or a person's mortality. Regardless of who starts the conversation, it should be brought up in a gentle and respectful manner. Instead of focusing on uncomfortable subjects like death or taxes, it may be best for parents to talk to their kids about their financial values.

Doing so may help to prepare them for a time when mom and dad aren't able to manage a child's finances. Adult children who bring up the topic of estate planning will ideally frame it as a conversation about wills, trusts or other tools that might be beneficial for the family as a whole. It is important for family members to keep working toward creating a trust or other plan documents even if it is an uncomfortable or slow process.

The online lives of people in South Carolina often create digital assets. An estate plan that does not describe how to access digital assets might leave the executor of an estate and heirs permanently disconnected from the digital estate.

Digital assets take many forms, including photos and other files stored in cloud accounts, social media accounts, email accounts and online financial accounts. The first step in organizing a digital estate requires taking a complete inventory. People need to write down all online accounts along with user IDs, passwords and other authentication steps. The inventory should also address automated payments. Without knowledge of automated transactions, the executor of an estate or surviving family members might have trouble tracking down the sources of account debits. After identifying all digital assets and liabilities, people can then decide who should have access to them.

Many South Carolina residents work long and hard to give themselves financial security during their working years and beyond, which includes, hopefully, a long, healthy and happy retirement. People are living longer, and retirement living is becoming more costly. Moreover, unexpected medical expenses can eat up sizeable chunks of money. However, if it is anticipated that an individual's estate assets will be considerable, estate planning becomes even more of a concern than it is for people with less property. Although a will can suffice as a means to designate which beneficiaries are to receive which estate assets, a trust can also do so but with more precision and control.

Even in the most basic of family scenarios, where a married couple has children, what happens to the couple's estate when one of the spouse passes can become problematic. One option is to leave everything to the other spouse with the assumption that he or she will then split whatever is left among the children. However, the surviving spouse can thereafter remarry and, perhaps, have other children. The picture then becomes murkier. Financial advisors often suggest a trust can provide more flexibility than a will for many of the 'what if" circumstances that may become a reality.

It may be easier for special needs individuals to retain access to government services if their assets are held in a trust. However, it is important that their South Carolina parents carefully structure the trust so that it is exempt from income and resource rules. Special needs trusts must irrevocable, for the benefit of only one person and can only pay for medical or dental needs not provided by other sources.

However, money inside of the trust can pay for a vacation, a video game console or anything else a special needs individual could want or need. The reason why special needs trusts are exempt is because the beneficiary cannot access the resources it holds or demand that they be distributed. Those who create special needs trusts should inform family members and others to make gifts to the trust as opposed to the beneficiary directly.