Many articles about estate planning open something like this: Pew Research Center found that only about a third of American adults have a will. Even among people in their sixties, it’s fewer than half.
If you’re here, odds are you already have a will. You sat down with an attorney at some point, signed the documents, and put them somewhere safe. You did the responsible thing, and you’re ahead of most of the country. And yet, you may be less protected than you think.
A will is a set of instructions handed to a probate court, and it doesn’t take effect until you die. It says nothing about who manages your money if you have a stroke at 62. It says nothing about who can talk to your doctors. And unless the beneficiary form names your estate, it has no say over your IRA, your 401(k), or your life insurance at all.
A will is one document in a plan. It is not the whole plan. Estate planning beyond a will makes up the rest of it.
Is a Will Enough, or Do I Need a Trust Too?
For some families, a will paired with well-coordinated beneficiary designations does the job. For others, a revocable living trust adds control a will can’t provide.
The practical difference is this: a will is a set of instructions, while a trust is a container. Assets you retitle into a revocable living trust pass to your beneficiaries privately, outside probate, on the terms you set. You stay in control during your lifetime, and you can change the terms whenever you want.
Control is usually the reason families choose one. Consider a couple with a 24-year-old and a 27-year-old. A will typically hands each of them their share in a lump sum. A trust can release assets in stages, keep them insulated from a child’s future divorce or creditor claim, or set aside a portion for a child who needs long-term support. If you own property in more than one state, a trust can also spare your family from a separate probate process in each.
Families sometimes assume trusts are only for the ultra-wealthy. For 2026, the lifetime federal estate and gift tax exemption is $15 million per individual, and Ohio has no state estate tax, which means estate taxes aren’t a factor for the vast majority of families. So, the question isn’t simply whether you have enough to justify a trust. It’s whether you want privacy, timing, and a say in what happens next.
Can Beneficiary Designations Override My Will?
Simple answer: yes. Retirement accounts, life insurance, annuities, and transfer-on-death accounts pass to whoever is named on the form. Your will doesn’t override that paperwork and neither does your trust. The custodian follows the designation on file.
For example, someone’s will leaves everything equally to their three children. But the IRA, opened years earlier, still names only the oldest, because that’s who they had in mind when they filled out the form. The will says split it three ways. The custodian pays the one name on file. The paperwork worked exactly as designed. It just wasn’t designed for the life this person actually ended up living.
Here are two things worth doing this month. First, pull up every account with a beneficiary field and confirm the primary name is current. Then add a contingent beneficiary to each one.
Ohio also allows a transfer-on-death designation affidavit for real estate, which can move a home to your heirs without probate. It’s a useful tool, and it’s one more designation that needs to agree with the rest of your plan.
What Estate Documents Does Every Adult Need?
Estate planning beyond a will starts with four documents that do most of the work while you’re still living.
A durable financial power of attorney names someone to manage money, taxes, and property if you can’t. Without one, your family may need to petition a probate court for guardianship, which can be slow, public, and expensive at the worst possible moment. A healthcare power of attorney names someone to make medical decisions. A living will records your wishes about end-of-life care, so the person you named isn’t guessing. A HIPAA authorization lets that person actually receive information from your providers.
Then there’s the piece many plans forget to address altogether: digital assets. This could include email, photo libraries, password managers, online banking, business accounts, and anything holding cryptocurrency. Under Ohio’s digital assets law, an executor can generally reach most of these, but the contents of your private communications are a separate category. Those are released only if you’ve granted permission, either through the provider’s own legacy-contact settings or through specific language in your will, trust, and power of attorney. Without that permission, an executor can spend months locked out of an account while the provider’s terms of service govern instead. Pair the documents with a short inventory stored securely, and note that self-custodied crypto is the one asset where a lost key means it is simply gone.
How Often Should I Update My Estate Plan?
Every three to five years is a reasonable rhythm, and immediately after anything that changes the picture, such as a marriage or divorce, birth, death in the family, move to another state, pension rollover or large account consolidation, or the sale of a business or a second property.
The other trigger has nothing to do with your assets. It’s the people you’ve named. The brother you chose as executor 15 years ago may not be the right choice today. Neither may the trustee you picked before your children were adults. Those names deserve their own review, on their own schedule.
Who Should Be Involved in My Estate Plan?
Estate planning works best when your attorney, your CPA, and your advisor are looking at the same picture. That coordination is a core part of comprehensive financial planning, and it’s how charitable intentions, tax strategy, and account titling end up pointing the same direction instead of working against each other. Giving is a good example. A charity named as beneficiary of a traditional IRA receives that money without owing income tax, while your children would owe tax on the same dollars. Which account you give from changes how much actually reaches the people and causes you care about, so how you structure your giving deserves its own conversation.
If it’s been more than a few years since anyone looked at your documents, that’s the place to start. Reach out to our team at Stirling Capital and we’ll walk through what you have, what’s missing, and what to do about it.
