Plain English Estate Plans for the Smaller Estate  

is a computer-assembly document forms package containing all of the customary estate plan documents for estates below the federal estate tax limit of $1.5M single or $3M couple.  All Wills and Trust in the package are written in Plain English, and the complete package is specifically geared to the needs of:

 The General Practitioner and the Client! 

For the General Practioner:

Plain English Estate Plans is intended for the General Practitioner who wants to provide basic estate planning services in a user-friendly Plain English format.

It is written for the HotDocs document assembly program. It provides all the basic (and some not-so-basic) forms required for estates where federal taxation is not an issue, and for estates where all that is needed for estate tax planning is to ensure that the estate of each half of a married couple is placed in a tax-sheltered trust.  

It includes Wills, one-person Living Trusts, and two-person Joint Living Trusts.  It has powers of attorney for finance and for health care.  It has Living Wills, personal property distribution lists, and burial and funeral instructions.

It handles outright distributions to spouses, children and their descendants. It handles a variety of trusts for spouses, including QTIP, income-only, fully discretionary, disclaimer-funded, and Special Needs trusts.  For descendants, it includes pot and separate share trusts, fully discretionary and purely educational trusts, and Special Needs trusts.  Property can be distributed from the trust in one, two or three distributions, or retained in trust for a child's life.

It also has several letters to the client, and a full selection of "packaging" documents, such as summaries of the trust or estate plan, tables of contents, instructions for safekeeping documents, and asset and people lists.  With this program, you can present your client with a complete and professional-looking estate plan package.

As long as each spouse's estate can stay in one tax-sheltered trust, the forms you need are here. You can even go above the federal limits for one spouse's estate with this package, by placing that spouse's entire estate in a single QTIP trust, which can then be partially elected for the marital deduction, if that spouse's estate is too large to be completely sheltered by the unified credit amount.  

If the estate you are planning needs more sophisticated tax planning that that, you can still use this program for the basic documents, and simply manually import your favorite division and funding clauses into the computer-assembled document.

For the Client:   Plain English Wills and Trusts!

All of the Will and Trust forms included in this program are written in a Plain English format, intended to be easily understood by all. For an example, check out the "Side-by-Side"  page on this site. 

The Plain English forms, combined with the packaging documents, provide you with everything you need to give your clients a complete, comprehensive, easily navigable, and understandable estate plan.

For the Secretary:  

HotDocs is an easy-to-learn and easy-to-use document assembly program, using the word processor's merge functions and macros to automate document generation.

Input the information once, and it automatically appears across all documents generated for that client.  Select from checklists or drop-down lists the options that need to go into the document, and the appropriate provisions are selected and inserted, and any additional information required is automatically requested.

Automated document assembly takes care of document generation quickly and easily.  This lets you and your staff concentrate on the substantive issue of what kind of estate plan is appropriate for your client's needs.  It lets you generate the documents is a short time frame, maximizing client satisfaction with the service provided.  And it gives you and your staff the time to concentrate on customer service.

When combined with flat fee billing for estate plans, this program will allow  you to provide your clients with better service and an understandable estate plan for a predictable price, while minimizing the costs and time required for document generation and proofing.