Estate Planning update: questionnaires, special needs trusts and specific gifts

For Washington and Oregon Users

Build Your Own questionnaire

• Links to help articles. Clients now see links to short help articles beside the questions they explain: getting started, what to gather, special needs planning, choosing your agents, Will or Revocable Trust, beneficiary designations, and a reading list for each goal the client checks. Links open in a new tab and appear only when the section or answer they relate to applies.
• Financial Information follows Assets. On the Questionnaire Setup tab, if you choose Select All and then untick Assets, the Financial Information and Asset Details tabs are now hidden. Unticking Liabilities hides the Liabilities tab.

Printable questionnaire

• New sections. It can now include health care and final arrangements pages:
  • Washington offers Health Care Preferences, End of Life Preferences, and Final Arrangements and Remembrance.
  • Oregon offers Health Care Preferences, and Final Arrangements and Remembrance.
• Choose which fiduciary roles to print. When you include Fiduciaries you can pick from Personal Representatives or Trustees, Financial Agent, Health Care Agent, Disposition of Remains Agent, and Guardians.
• PDF or Word. A new “What format do you want?” question lets you create it as a PDF or as a Word document, so you can add your own questions.
• Grandchildren table. It now continues on the same page as the Children table.

Special needs trusts

• When a special needs beneficiary is the only residuary beneficiary, the Will and Trusts now always give the residue to the special needs trust. This also works for plans saved before the distribution answer was filled in.
• In that case the Estate Plan Summary no longer repeats “your remaining assets will be”.

Specific gifts

• Specific gifts of cash, real property and business interests now appear in the trust, Will and Estate Plan Summary when the residue does not pass to the surviving spouse at the first death. Before, these gifts could be left out of the documents.

Oregon only

• In Oregon questionnaires, the health care section of Fiduciary Choices is now headed “Health Care Representative (Your Advance Directive)”.