What is Estate Planning?

What is Estate Planning?

Estate Planning and the LGBTQ Community

A marriage bestows concrete legal and tax benefits to heterosexual married couples. Sadly, the same laws that bestow those benefits do not recognize same same-sex couples – we are "invisible" in the eyes of the law and therefore have no legal relationship to one another.

Since the law treats gay and lesbian couples like legal strangers, we must create legal rights and protections through the use of estate planning documents and contracts.

2. The "Estate Plan" You Cannot Afford to Use! If you and your partner have not created Estate Planning documents, including a Last Will and Testament, your State has prepared an estate plan for you -- free of charge!

This free estate plan is referred to as "intestacy" or “intestate succession.” Under your State’s intestacy laws, your elected officials were kind enough to assume that they know best how you would want your estate to be distributed. And of course, since state laws tend to discriminate against same-sex couples (at the very least they do not acknowledge our right to exist), when we die without a Last Will the law assumes we would want our estate to pass to our biological relatives. And only after much of the value has been used up in a costly and time consuming probate proceeding.

Your biological relatives consist of (in this approximate order of importance) your legal (heterosexual) spouse, your children, you parents, your siblings, your aunts and uncles, your nieces and nephews, your cousins, and so on. If you have no biological relatives then the State will inherit your estate.

Nowhere on this list does it mention your same-sex partner. In order to include your partner, you must put your wishes in a legal writing!