Somehow or another my husband and I have never gotten around to writing a will. We have a fair amount of properties and assets at this stage in our lives, but we’ve never taken a pen to paper to determine what to do with them if something happens to us.
With a little one on the way we decided it was definitely time to complete this task. We met with an attorney today and walked away with a long set of tasks to complete. While estate planning is important, our attention is most specifically focused on who would attain custody of our child and who would maintain control of our financial assets.
In an ideal world we would leave our little one in the hands of someone who can both care for the baby and handle our associated finances. The task of deciding is much more difficult than I would have initially thought, so we’ve decided to take a few days to think it over.
The attorney advised us to create a simple will for the time being to ensure that we have something in place sooner than later. However, my husband would really like to review our assets and have a plan for all of our financial assets if possible. He also advised us to create a SPLAT scenario. A scenario in which everyone in our immediate family dies and we have to decide how to split up our assets.
So this week’s task is to review all of the documents and details of our finances in order to decide how best to plan for the future of our baby and our money. While it’s a little creepy to think about what would happen after we’re gone, the planner in me is happy that we’re finally getting around to these tasks.
We’ve taken such good care of the money we’ve earned up until now that it seems only right that we figure out what should happen to it after we’ve passed.