An Estate Plan Is Only as Good as Its Execution
A client sits across from us with a leather binder embossed with a law firm’s name on the cover. Inside: a revocable living trust, a pour-over will, a durable power of attorney, a healthcare proxy. Drafted seven years ago. Signed. Notarized. Stored.
They paid about $8,000 for it, within the typical Massachusetts range for attorney-prepared trust packages. They consider their estate handled.
We ask a few questions:
- Is the house still titled in your name, or in the trust’s?
- When did you last look at the beneficiary designation on your IRA?
- If you were hospitalized tomorrow, would your daughter be able to find the healthcare proxy and get it in front of the doctor on call?
- Has anything changed in the last seven years that the plan should know about: a child’s marriage, a grandchild, a sale, a death in the family?
More often than not, one or more of those answers reveals that the plan on paper is not the plan in force.
This is the most common estate planning failure we encounter, and it has very little to do with the quality of the documents themselves. The documents are usually fine. The execution is where plans go to die.
What execution actually means
Drafting an estate plan is one engagement. Executing it, and keeping it executed, is an ongoing discipline. The two are not the same thing, and most families don’t realize the second half exists until something goes wrong.
Execution is the specific, unglamorous work of:
- Funding the trust. Retitling the deed on your house, the brokerage account, the LLC interest, the out-of-state cottage. If the assets don’t move into the trust, the trust is paperwork and the assets go through probate.
- Keeping beneficiary designations current. The beneficiary form on your IRA, your 401(k), your life insurance, your TOD brokerage account overrides your will. An ex-spouse still listed from 1998 on an employer retirement plan can inherit it regardless of what your trust says: federal law honors the beneficiary form on file. This is one of the most common and most damaging errors in estate planning, and fixing it is a ten-minute phone call that almost nobody makes.
- Healthcare documents that are accessible. A healthcare proxy in a locked filing cabinet three hundred miles from the hospital is not a healthcare proxy. Copies need to be with the people who might use them, and the original needs to be somewhere findable.
- Updates when life changes. A new child, a divorce, a death, a move to a new state, a significant inheritance, a liquidity event in a business. Each of these is a trigger for a plan review. None of them call the attorney on your behalf.
- Coordinated professional work. When the plan does need an attorney’s touch (a real-estate transfer, an amendment, a new trust for a minor grandchild), someone has to coordinate that. Engage the lawyer. Prepare the materials. Track the completion.
None of that is exotic. It’s work that requires someone to be paying attention continuously, rather than episodically.
Why hourly professionals don’t close the gap
Estate attorneys and CPAs are exceptional at what they do, and you need both at various points in your life. But their economic model is built around engagements: a matter opens, work gets done, bills get paid, the matter closes. A client paying several hundred dollars an hour for legal time doesn’t typically want to pay that rate to have someone check every twelve months whether a beneficiary form needs updating. The attorney understands that. So the engagement ends, the binder goes on the shelf, and the plan starts drifting from reality immediately.
A family that wants continuous maintenance through their attorney can certainly pay for it. Very few do. The incentives aren’t set up to encourage it.
That’s the gap. It’s real, and it’s the reason most estate plans, even good ones, degrade into paperwork.
Where a financial advisor fits
A wealth management relationship is, by design, continuous. We’re already reviewing portfolios, account structures, cash flow, tax positioning, and life changes on a regular cadence. Adding estate plan maintenance to that cadence doesn’t require a new engagement; it’s part of the same review.
This is the work an advisor can do that an hourly professional typically won’t:
- Track trust funding as an ongoing checklist. When you open a new brokerage account, we know. When you buy a cottage in New Hampshire, we make sure the deed ends up in the right place.
- Verify beneficiary designations across every retirement account, insurance policy, and TOD account annually. Any mismatch against your stated intentions, we flag.
- Hold copies of your healthcare documents in a client file and make sure you know how to access them, and make sure your kids do too, if that’s appropriate.
- Know you well enough that when something changes (a grandchild, a remarriage, a diagnosis), we raise the question of whether the plan needs revisiting before you think to ask.
- When an attorney is needed for an amendment, prepare the materials in advance so the lawyer’s time goes to the legal work, not to rediscovering the basics.
Much of this, in a Long Point relationship, happens as part of what we already do. Documents get produced through Wealth.com, the estate planning platform we’ve built into the client relationship. Drafts get reviewed. Updates get captured. The client doesn’t have to remember to initiate any of it, because somebody else is paying attention on their behalf.
The test
There’s a simple way to check whether your existing estate plan is actually in force.
Open the binder. Look at the funding checklist if you have one. Pull up your most recent brokerage statement and see whose name is on the account. Look at the deed to your house if you can find it. Call the custodian who holds your IRA and ask them to read you the beneficiary designation on file. Think about whether any of your children have gotten married, divorced, had children, or moved since you signed the documents.
If the answers line up with the plan, the plan is working. If they don’t, the plan is a relic, and fixing it is almost always simpler and cheaper than people expect.
But someone has to actually do it. That’s the part nobody tells you at the signing.
Who this is for
This piece is for anyone, client or not, who has estate documents somewhere and isn’t sure whether the plan they paid for is actually in force. It is also for anyone looking into estate planning for the first time who wants to understand, before they start, what the work really is.
The documents are the easy part. Execution is the work. And execution is what an ongoing advisory relationship is built to provide.
If your binder has not been opened since the day it was signed, start there. The consultation is a conversation, not a sales call.