Modern Enemy Number 2-Remarriages!

The assumption married couples make when they do their planning is that one of them will die, and the surviving spouse will live alone for a few years and then die, and then of course what’s left of the couples lifetime of hard work and savings will be used to help make life a little easier for their children and grandchildren.

That may have been true a hundred years ago when the average life span was 50, but now with an average life span approaching 80, that is just not smart planning. In a modern estate plan, if you aren’t designing a plan that will protect your children from a remarriage by your spouse, then you may just want to give your money to your children now, because that is the only way you can be sure it will go to your children and not your spouse’s new stepchildren!

Married couples almost always tell me the same thing: “Oh, if I survive Sally (or Harry), I would never get married again.” That may be the politically correct thing to say in front of your spouse in your attorney’s office, but if you want to actually protect your children and grandchildren (and your spouse), then you need to plan for reality.

Statistically more than 60 percent of men and approximately 20 percent of women are involved in a new romance or remarried within just over two years of being widowed, according to the article “Dating and Remarriage over the First Two Years of Widowhood” (Annals of Clinical Psychiatry, 8, 51-57).

My own mother remarried within five years of my father’s death, and my parents had been married for 40 years. And guess what? That’s right; I can remember them saying in front of me my entire life at home that if one of them died the survivor would never get remarried again. In my experience never seems to be between two to five years!

The younger the widow or widower is, the higher the probability that they will remarry; and the longer that second marriage lasts, the higher the probability that the children of the first marriage will not get an inheritance.

So what happens to the inheritance? Are there a bunch of predators out there just waiting to prey on widows and widowers? Yes, there are, and that is one reason I see fortunes rerouted to unintended beneficiaries (unintended by you, but intended by the person who rerouted it). The reasons I see more often, however, for children from the first marriage not receiving a dime are that the remarried parent is either careless or foolish, and they die before their new spouse. Literally millions if not billions of dollars of inheritances every year going to unintended strangers due to poor planning!

While it is certainly true that you don’t have to leave any inheritance to your children and grandchildren, you probably don’t want everything that you worked so hard for all your life to go to complete strangers. Yes, I know, I hear it all the time: “We’re going to spend everything so there won’t be anything left for the kids.” I hear it all the time, but I never see it.

What I do see are a lot of estates that are set up with no protection for the surviving spouse or the children from the first marriage. As a result of this ever-increasing phenomenon, I am now recommending that married couples insert key provisions in their revocable trust that provides protection for the surviving spouse and the children from the first marriage.

The Surviving Spouse Protection PlanTM

I call this provision the Surviving Spouse Protection PlanTM because it protects the surviving spouse from predators and from themselves just not paying attention to how the trust is managed. It also prevents a spouse from giving away the entire estate to someone else when he or she becomes older and more susceptible to the influence of new people in his or her life.

It is awful to have to face the horrible truth, but it’s a fact. I have seen it much too often in my practice. Clients who were brilliant in their prime lose their ability to make good choices as they get into 80s and 90s, and yet these are the years when people make the most changes in their estate plans.

The Surviving Spouse Protection PlanTM is how to make sure your family doesn’t suffer from the Cinderella Effect of a lifetime of savings going to someone other than your children.

The Modern Asset Protection Trust (M.A.P.T) TM

At Modern Asset Protection Planning, we’ve developed the Modern Asset Protection Trust.TM This trust and its related documents (financial powers of attorney) have all the necessary language to protect your spouse from predators or just inadvertently mixing assets with a new spouse and jeopardizing a life time of hard work and savings that was meant for your children and grandchildren. But modern documents are only part of the solution. Keeping your plan up to date, and you and your family educated and trained is even more important. For example, what if

your spouse gets remarried and your children don’t know about the Surviving Spouse Protection features of your estate plan? Pretty silly to have a great plan and have no one know about it right?

Just the F.A.C.T.S.TM

That is why we have developed the Family Awareness Comprehensive Training System (F.A.C.T.S.).TM Unlike many estate plans that are drafted and put in a file cabinet or safe, never to see the light of day until your family pulls them out to see they don’t work, we have developed a system to automatically keep you, and your family, current, trained and aware. We provide online education and training to you, your family and anyone else who needs to know about your plan. We show them what to do when, and we don’t nickel and dime you with hourly fees. For

members of our F.A.C.T.System, we automatically keep your plan up-to-date, and your family educated on what to do when. It is a radical new way of bringing the dusty old legal industry into the 21st century, and I am not aware of another program like it in the country.

Because of what my family went through, I never want another person or family to have to fight off the children of a new spouse! It can be prevented, but you must empower yourself and your family now before there is a need.

For those of you who have attended my workshops you know I speak of Six (6) modern enemies of family’s wealth. This was enemy number two (2). Enemy number three (3) can be just as devastating because now one thinks about it. I call it the unseen killer!