How a Divorce Affects Your Estate Plan
Transcript:
Hi, I'm Jordan Flake. I'm an attorney at Clear Counsel Law Group.
One of the questions our law firm gets a lot is: What happens to my estate planning if I'm in a divorce?
You can imagine a situation where maybe a husband and a wife did their estate planning, maybe they got a trust or some wills or power of attorney documents, and then a few years later there's trouble in paradise and they have to go file for divorce.
Do they have to, in that situation, go through all of their estate planning and unwind and undo everything and reexecute new documents?
The answer is they probably should do that, but the reality is Nevada has a law that makes it so that after a divorce all of the provisions of your estate planning that include either your husband or your wife who is now your ex-husband or your ex-wife are considered invalidated by the divorce.
Those documents are largely invalidated by operation of law.
However, it also makes a lot of sense in that situation to come back and see your estate planning attorney or just bring it to us so that we can take a look at it and see what else might need to be done.
That's normally the process.
Brian, any follow-up questions on that?
Brian: Can you plan for a divorce in your estate plan?
Jordan: You could. You could say in the event of a divorce, this, this, and this.
It's an interesting question as to whether or not that would be invalidated under the law.
I think it wouldn't be because that would be like a prenup where it was basically, listen, this contemplated our divorce so you could put provisions that said, listen, this is how it's going to go, but in the event of a divorce, this is how we want it to go.
That language might be given the same legal validity as your basic pre-nuptial agreement. In any event.
If any of these situations are affecting you, come in and let us do a free consultation where we just sit down and review what you have and review what you want to accomplish.
We'll make sure we get it done.
