Estate planning can feel overwhelming, but the concept of spring cleaning offers a practical framework for staying on top of your plan with low pressure and specific, achievable goals. This episode outlines four key tasks for an estate plan review: updating a chart of assets with ownership and beneficiary information, locating and organizing essential documents (wills, trusts, powers of attorney, healthcare directives), confirming that named decision makers still reflect your wishes, and opening communication with family members about legacy topics.

A key element of any estate plan is the completion of beneficiary designations and payable-on-death designations for assets. These documents may look routine, but they control who receives certain accounts. This episode discusses issues to consider when filling out these designations, and provides some guidance and potential pitfalls.

Estate and tax planning is often influenced by specific numbers and thresholds, such as the estate/gift tax exemption, the GST tax exemption, the annual exclusion amount and income tax brackets. These numbers are periodically adjusted for inflation. This episode summarizes inflation adjustments for 2026 and provides guidance on how the new numbers might affect planning.

An estate plan can address not only what happens upon a person’s passing but also how decisions are made if the person cannot make them during life. One set of documents — called a living will, healthcare power of attorney, advance directive or advance medical directive, depending on the state — designates an agent to make healthcare decisions on the person’s behalf and communicates what care they would or would not want to receive if they cannot make those decisions themselves.

This document can be critical in providing clarity and avoiding confusion in the event of incapacity — such as if the client is in a coma or unconscious, is disabled or is in surgery. This episode explores these documents and how best to structure them.

To make sure an estate plan can be administered effectively, it takes more than putting in place the right documents, structures and strategies. The executor, agent, trustee and other important figures must have access to information that will help them administer the estate or trust – and in many cases, the successors don’t know where to begin. This episode explores one of the most popular concepts from the last 50 episodes: the “death dossier,” a collection of documents and records that help successors identify and administer the assets in the event of a client’s death or incapacity.

A power of attorney is a foundational document in an estate plan that names an agent to make decisions on behalf of the principal who, for instance, is disabled or not available. While it can be an important method of managing the principal’s finances, there are key issues the planner should consider when drafting a power of attorney.

When donors make gifts — during their lives or upon death — they typically give up control. Trusts have long been a tool for donors to maintain influence over how assets are managed and distributed by choosing trustees and drafting instructions. Traditionally, the settlor — the person creating the trust — cannot serve as trustee, especially if they want the trust to achieve certain tax or asset protection goals.

But an AI program could be trained on the settlor’s wishes to make decisions the way the settlor would. This program can be incorporated into the trust structure as a settlor-trained AI (STAI) trustee, in a formal or informal way, so that a digital version of the settlor provides guidance long after the settlor can.

This episode explores the concept of the STAI trustee and summarizes key concepts from a recent article Steve authored with colleague David Hirsch. The STAI trustee could be a powerful tool to help settlors structure trusts to carry out their wishes in the future, but there are pitfalls to navigate in exploring this concept.

Under current law, individuals have a high estate tax exemption. But if one spouse dies without using all of his or her remaining exemption, steps can be taken to allow the surviving spouse to pick up and use a deceased spouse’s exemption — the Deceased Spouse’s Unused Exclusion (DSUE) — through a process called portability. This can result in significant tax savings upon the surviving spouse’s death.

Yet the election for portability is not automatic. There are steps that must be taken and other nuances to consider in electing portability. The recent case of Rowland v. Commissioner illustrates potential pitfalls and the importance of following the applicable requirements to take advantage of this important election.

Rowland also serves as a reminder to review the estate plan to ensure it properly takes advantage of and recognizes the limits of portability and that processes are in place so that upon one spouse’s death, due consideration is given to whether to elect portability.