A while back - actually two years ago, I did a very heartfelt post about Wills & Trusts. If you're smart, you'll take a minute and read it. It's good information and in a tough situation, it may definitely save your bacon.

I consider myself something of an expert on this subject, mainly because we have now lost all four of our parents and not one of them had a properly written will or a proper trust set up. If they had, I might be writing this from my cozy living room instead of sitting in my office at 5:00 on a Friday! It made that much difference in the size of the inheritances we received.

So, I'm going to ask you flat out. Do you have a will? If you don't, sit back and think for a minute - why not?

OK, what's the answer? Why not? Do you think that writing a will is going to make you more likely to die? I've got a news flash for you honey, we're all going to die, and some of us are going to do it sooner than we've planned. Do you want to leave your spouse and children unprotected and unprepared to carry on after you are gone?

Maybe you think it's going to be too much work and too much money? Trust me. Nothing in this world is more work or more expensive than dealing with the courts when someone has died without a proper will. It's really not that bad to pull a will together. It took us five minutes to find our lawyer - turns out he lives right around the corner from us. And he's great. Really knows his stuff. And it took about two hours and about a thousand dollars to get the whole enchilada set up. Wills, trusts, medical incapacity provisions, and the whole ball of wax, and we had it in our hands in less than 1 week. That is not too much work or too much money to make sure our three boys are set to have a roof over their heads and a bit of money to help them when the time comes.

In addition to a will, you need to have your assets set up properly. Let's say that your husband died tomorrow. Not wishing anything bad on anyone, but just suppose. If you don't have a joint checking and savings account set up, you won't have access to any of his money, possibly for months. His paycheck will stop immediately, and you may not get any insurance money for weeks or months. Do you have your house and cars titled properly? If you don't have them written exactly correctly, you will have to get permission from the court to sell them, and that is not quick, it is not cheap, and it is not easy.

Trust me, I know. They made a small typo on our house title that my Dad had co-signed for. After he died, we went to sell our house, and they wouldn't let us. It was our house that we had paid every payment on, but since it had his name on it, we had to go through the probate court to get it fixed. Cost us more than a thousand dollars and weeks of delay and frustration.

What if he hasn't set you up properly as the beneficiary on his insurance? After we'd been married a couple of years, I was horrified to discover my husband still had his ex-wife on his life insurance at work. He didn't mean to, but he hadn't thought to update the information. If he'd died during that time, that could have been a very nasty scene.

What about your dependent children? If one or both of you died, or were suddenly incapacitated what would happen to them? You might want them to be cared for by your parents or by one of your siblings, but unless you've got that spelled out in an official document, the court can do whatever they think is best and that could mean foster care, or some other arrangement that you may not like. Courts are scary and they don't always do things that seem to make sense.

Let's talk for a minute about a trust. It sounds scary, and it's a little complicated, but you'd be surprised how much a properly written trust can save your family. Or how much money you could lose if you don't have one. I estimate that having a trust could have saved us $50,000 after my father-in-law died. We had begged him to do it, but he wouldn't budge and we're the ones who paid the price for it. Ask a lawyer. Any lawyer worth his salt will be more than happy to take a few minutes to sit down and talk to you absolutely free and explain how a trust works and what it will do for you.

So go and check it out. Go on, shoo! Go find a lawyer today and get the ball rolling. If you already have a will, take a minute to review it and make sure everything is up to date and things are in place for that just-in-case moment.

Come back every Thursday for a fresh dose of Smart Money.  If you'd like to see past posts on the subject, click on the Smart Money link at the bottom of this post.  

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