Estate Planning

What To Do With Family Heirlooms

March 28, 2022 by Colin Flannigan

Associate Colin Flannigan regularly advises clients in the practice areas of wills, trusts, estate and incapacity planning, estate administration, residential and commercial real estate, property matters, corporate transactions, and business law.

In this episode of Legal Matters, Colin explains a couple of different options when dealing with your family heirlooms as you create your estate plan and the considerations you may want to take.

Transcript:

When making your estate plan, you should consider addressing family heirlooms or sentimental personal belongings.

You will have a couple of options on how to do so. You can make provisions in your Will. In your Will, you can have specific gifts that go to specific people. Another alternative is a process for which your beneficiaries can pick items. If you do so, you have some flexibility on who's entitled to pick and how any order gets set.

Another option might be having a memorandum clause in your Will. This could allow you to make a memorandum to your Will with a list of specific items that go to specific people, and if you change your mind, you might be able to change that memorandum without going through the expense of changing your Will.

Some people go through the process of putting sticky notes on items. If that's the plan you want to do, make sure your Executor knows and talk to your estate planning professional to make sure that the process is going to be binding and it's going to work.

One last option might be making the gifts now while you're still with us. That way you can see those family heirlooms going to the people you want and see how much they appreciate it.

If you have any questions, please don't hesitate to contact us at FH&P Lawyers.