After a month of stories about plans that failed, I want to end with one that didn’t.
And the only reason it didn’t is that someone finally looked.
A couple came in last year for what they figured would be a quick formality. They were, by every measure, the responsible ones. A good attorney had set up their trust years earlier. They had the binder. They were sure they were all set. They only came in because their daughter kept nudging them, and a Plan Checkup was free, so what was the harm.
We spent about twenty minutes going through it. And we found three things. Their trust was only partly funded. A large retirement account and a rental property had never been moved in, and would have gone straight through probate. Their powers of attorney were more than a decade old and written in another state, the kind banks now routinely refuse. And they had left everything to their two kids outright, with no protection, one of whom was in the middle of a rough patch in his marriage. None of it was because they had been careless.
Every one of those gaps was invisible from where they sat, and nobody had ever told them to look. Their plan looked finished. It was not. Here is the good part. We caught all of it while there was still time to fix it.
We aligned the assets, updated the documents to current Florida law, and restructured the kids’ inheritance so it is protected for them, not from them. It took a fraction of the effort it would have cost their family to clean up later, because they came in on a normal Tuesday instead of during a crisis.
The husband said something on his way out that stuck with me.
“We were so sure it was handled. We had no idea.”
That is almost everyone. Not careless. Just certain, about something they had no way to check on their own. If your plan only looks finished, there is a chance a whole chapter is missing, and the only way to know is to look. We would be glad to look with you. It is fifteen minutes, and it is free, and it is the kind of thing your family will be grateful you did.