Though we don’t offer pre-planning services, we can provide some advice about what you can do to make things easier for your loved ones after you are no longer around.
- There are lots of great books about estate planning that make it very easy to leave clear records for your loved ones. Mesa Public Library has Get it Together, which comes with a link to worksheets you can fill out with all your important information. There are other useful estate planning books at the library.
- The best way to make things easy for your heirs is to avoid probate. You can avoid probate by either setting up a trust with an estate attorney, or by making sure all of your property and assets can pass to your heirs through non-probate transfers. This means ensuring that all your accounts have named beneficiaries, your home has a transfer-on-death-deed, and other strategies you can learn about here from the NM State Bar.
- One of our Professionals of After Loss Services colleagues specializes in estate planning. You can get a free spreadsheet to get you started at his website, The Reluctant Executor, and work with him for 1:1 coaching, as well.
- The State Bar of New Mexico’s Legal Resources for the Elderly has lots of pre-recorded and live webinars, New Mexico-specific blank templates and forms, and a helpline staffed by lawyers that will give advice.
- Have you considered what will happen to your digital assets?
- This Washington Post article from 2022 has some advice about how to set up a legacy contact for Apple, Google, Facebook, and more. This may change frequently, but searching for “legacy contact service name” should give you the most up-to-date information. If your loved ones try to get in to your digital assets without the passwords, they could get locked out permanently.
- You may use a password manager to store all of your passwords, in which case you can leave the master password information with your will and other end-of-life records, but know that the terms of service of many websites make it illegal for anyone other than the account holder to use the login information.
- We recommend specifically calling out digital assets in your will. Read more about how and why to do this in this article from the AARP.
- Financial planners strongly recommend that as you age you work on consolidating your assets. A financial planner can help you with this, but in general terms, the fewer bank accounts, retirement accounts, and investments you have, the easier it will be for your heirs to sort everything out.
- Local Financial Advisors (some of these folks are investment advisors, some are certified financial planners):
- Alpine Financial Partners, Ben Bouman, 2610 Trinity Dr., Los Alamos, 505-500-8420.
- Campbell & Associates, Jeremy C. Campbell, CRPC®, CMFC®, APMA®, 505-995-0714
- Edward Jones, Doug Mowrer, 555 Oppenheimer, 505-661-9754
- Stifel, Karson Nance, 505-303-4859
- Wiemann Wealth, Shelly A. Wiemann, CFP®, 2101 Trinity Dr., Los Alamos, 505-500-8428.
- If you foresee conflict among your heirs about your possessions, the University of Minnesota’s Grandma’s Yellow Pie Plate website has videos, workbooks, and more to help you sort and make decisions everyone will feel are fair.