Your estate plan does not expire.

Where other financial products and situations may have a window to act, or a maturity timeline, your Estate plan does not. Transactions break the estate plan, and no one sitting at the table during those transactions is watching your documents.

A note before you continue reading. I am a Certified Financial Planner™ and not an attorney, and every document, correction, and legal question in this post belongs with legal counsel. What I bring as a planner is the ability to review the transaction in a way that keeps what’s most important to you financially in mind, with a habit of asking what does this new transaction change.

That is a distinction that changes the answer to a common question. Ask how often an estate plan should be reviewed and you will hear every three to five years, plus after a marriage, a divorce, a birth, or a death. 

Reasonable advice, and incomplete in a way that costs households real money. The events on that list are the ones a person notices. 

The transactions that break an estate plan are the ones that feel like paperwork.

The Financial Transactions That Quietly Rewrite Your Estate Plan

Estate planning attorneys see this pattern often enough to write about the pattern. A Michigan firm published a case from Oakland County that shows the mistake clearly, and the mistake is a clear example worth borrowing here.

A mother set up a revocable trust. The brokerage accounts were retitled into the trust at creation. The house was deeded in. 

Everything performed correctly, and the plan worked exactly as designed. Years later, she refinanced the mortgage.

The new deed came back in her personal name rather than the trust’s. Nobody caught the change, because a refinance is not an estate planning event.

The brokerage accounts remained privately in the trust when she died. The house, the asset the trust was specifically built to protect, required full probate. 

Same family, same plan, same documents, and one asset going through the exact process the household paid to avoid. I am citing an attorney’s case rather than one of my own here for a reason. 

Attorneys administer estates and watch these failures surface. A financial planner reviews from a financial standpoint these transactions that caused failures. 

How a Certified Financial Planner(TM) helps when you review your estate plan

Reading what other professions publish is the least I can do to stay aware of situations that may concern my clients. And the fact that this pattern is common enough for a firm to write about is why I want to share this with you.

The refinance was handled properly by people doing the job they were hired to do. The trust was drafted properly by an attorney who had no way to know about a transaction that had not happened yet.

The seam between those two engagements belonged to who? In this scenario no one held this responsibility; therefore, this went unchecked. 

The beneficiary form supersedes the trust documents in your estate plan

Here is the part of estate planning that surprises households most. Beneficiary designations override your will and your trust. 

A retirement account, a life insurance policy, an annuity, a payable-on-death bank account, every one of those passes to whoever is named on the form, regardless of what any other document says.

The Supreme Court settled this in Kennedy v. Plan Administrator for DuPont Savings and Investment Plan in 2009. A husband and wife divorced. 

The divorce decree stated plainly that the ex-wife waived any claim to his retirement plan. He died without updating the form. 

The ex-wife received the money, because a plan administrator is legally obligated to follow the plan documents rather than the divorce terms. 

The Court reached the same conclusion in Egelhoff v. Egelhoff in 2001, and again on a federal life insurance policy in Hillman v. Maretta in 2013.

That is the version of this story everybody tells, and the ex-spouse case is dramatic enough to remember.

The version I see far more often is quieter.

A client tells me who should receive what from their accounts, and insurance. Then we pull the actual forms. The named beneficiaries do not match what they described, or the percentages assigned to those beneficiaries do not match what they described. 

And sometimes both. Not because anything went wrong. 

However, a form filled out in one moment reflects that moment, and the household’s intentions kept developing while the paperwork went unchanged. 

• A designation made when there were two children. 
• An account opened during a job change where a default got accepted without much thought. 
• A percentage split that made sense against a balance sheet that has since changed from when the beneficiary form was updated.

Percentages are where the gap hides best. A household describes an even split among three children. 

The form says fifty, twenty-five, twenty-five, set years ago for a reason that made sense then and has since been forgotten. The account owner does not read the form again, because the form feels completed, one and done.

Your beneficiary form is not a record of what you want. Your beneficiary form is a record of what you signed.

What you want and what’s signed is the same thing only if somebody checks.

The transactions that break estate plans

The calendar advice of reviewing your estate documents every 3 to 5 years, covers the events that closely look like administration.

A refinance. The deed can come back in an individual name. Verify the title after every closing.

Forming an entity. Move a property into an LLC and the household no longer owns real estate directly, they own a membership interest in a company that owns real estate. Different assets pass differently, and the estate plan may describe something that no longer exists. 

What happens when a rental property moves into an entity covers the coordination questions that follow.

1. Opening a new account. Accounts opened after a trust is funded sit outside the trust unless somebody titles them deliberately. A new brokerage account, a new bank account, a rollover IRA at a new custodian.
2. A job change. A new 401(k) means a new beneficiary form, frequently completed quickly during onboarding alongside health insurance elections.
3. Moving to another state. Property law, homestead protection, and community property rules vary. A plan drafted in one state may operate differently in another.
4. A business sale. Proceeds from the sale are as a new asset, in a new account, with a new designation, and rarely inside anything the existing plan describes.
5. A death in the extended family. A named beneficiary who dies, but the form is not updated. A contingent beneficiary who was never named leaves the account defaulting to the estate, which puts the asset into probate.

None of these appears on a standard review checklist, and every one of them can put an asset outside a plan the household believes is complete.

A seven-year-old estate plan is not an old plan by most standards. Seven years is old enough to predate a business sale, a property sale / property purchases, and a child’s marriage.

How Failures Arrive in Estate Plan Reviews

Documents drafted. The attorney paid. Trust signed and funded. Everything the household was told to do, done.

And a house in probate because a deed came back wrong. Or a retirement account paying out fifty, twenty-five, twenty-five when the family expected thirds, and the difference discovered by the children rather than the parent.

Built but not protected applies here as much as anywhere in a financial structure. The documents exist. The protection stopped matching the household somewhere along the way, and nothing announced the change.

The discovery arrives during administration, which is the worst possible moment. The person who could have corrected the mismatch is gone, and the people who inherit the mismatch are the ones dealing with the consequences.

What to check, and when

The calendar review is a backstop rather than a system. Here is the system.

After every transaction on the list above, confirm two things: how the assets are titled, and who is named on the account. Two questions, and most transactions take under fifteen minutes to verify.

Pull the actual forms once a year. Not what you remember. Not what the plan says. The current designation on each account, requested from the custodian.

Read the percentages, not only the names. This is the check that easily falls through the crack, and the one that most often reveals a gap.

Confirm every contingent beneficiary. Primary designations get attention. Contingents rarely do, and a missing contingent beneficiary sends an asset to the estate if the primary beneficiary is not available.

Verify the title on real property after any closing or refinance. The county record is what governs, regardless of what any document says the trust owns.

Describe your intentions out loud, then check the paperwork against the description. This is the exercise that surfaces the mismatch. Say who should receive what and in what proportion, then read the forms. Where the two disagree, the paperwork wins.

Every correction on that list runs through an attorney. What a financial planner does is notice that a transaction has happened and ask the question nobody at that closing table was hired to ask.

Your estate plan does not expire

The documents do not decay. They stay exactly as written, describing a household that keeps changing around them.

A refinance moves a deed. A rollover creates a form. A business sale creates an account. Each one is handled correctly by somebody, and none of those somebodies is looking at the estate plan.

Reviewing on a schedule catches some of that. Watching transactions catches more.

The Wealth at Risk Structure Audit scores four dimensions of financial structure, and Estate documents is one of them. Ten questions, two minutes, and the result names which gap runs furthest ahead of the structure behind.

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