Happy New Year! 

It’s now 2026, and many of us are looking for ways to start the new year on a good foot. In this week’s article, we look at 5 Estate Plan New Year’s Resolutions. 

1. Review/Update your Estate Plan

After setting up your estate plan, it’s nice to sit back and take a sigh of relief. However, your estate plan is not something you should neglect after completing it. Every couple of years or so (or after any major event in your life), you should review your estate plan to see if (a) your named fiduciaries still make sense, and (b) your distribution of your assets after death is still what you would like. For many families, there are two major transition points where they change their fiduciary designations from parents to siblings/friends and then from siblings/friends to their adult children. Marriages, births, and deaths in your family can also spark needed changes.

2. Organize Financials/Passwords for Fiduciaries

A comprehensive estate plan will have fiduciaries listed to help you if you become incapacitated and to manage your affairs after you’ve passed away. These agents have important jobs, and the best thing you can do to thank them is to organize your financial information and passwords in advance. Creating a spreadsheet of your financial accounts (including bank, retirement, investment, etc.) can be invaluable to the person who steps in to manage your affairs. In a similar vein, creating a system to allow others to access passwords to your email and other online accounts can make payments like utilities much easier for them. 

3. Trust Funding

If you created a trust as part of your estate plan, it is important to make sure your trust is funded properly. “Funding” a trust means to assign title of assets to your trust or to list your trust as a pay-on-death or transfer-on-death beneficiary. If your trust is not properly funded, assets may need to pass through your estate to get to your trust. This means that those assets will need to go through probate (often a major purpose of creating a trust is to avoid probate). You should reach out to your estate planning attorney with any trust funding questions to make sure you are optimally funding your trust.

4. Give Out Health Care Proxy

Your Health Care Proxy is your true “emergency” estate planning document that allows your listed Health Care Agent to make health decisions for you when you are unable to do so yourself. Because it may need to be activated unexpectedly, it’s important that your Health Care Proxy is accessible to others. We recommend that all your Health Care Agents, including back-ups, have copies (PDFs are fine) of your Health Care Proxy. We also recommend that you give a copy of your Health Care Proxy to your doctors (often this can be done online by uploading it to your Health Portal). Some phones also permit you to have a copy of your Health Care Proxy easily accessible in an app.

5. Talking with your Family about your Estate Plan

Talking about death and incapacity can be a difficult conversation, especially with your closest loved ones. However, for older clients in particular, having these discussions with your loved ones while you are able and healthy can make future trials easier on everyone. In this way, finding time to sit down with your family to review your estate plan can be extremely beneficial. Another similar approach that people take is to write letters to your loved ones to include in your estate plan binder. These letters can explain uncomfortable realities in your estate plan such as unequal distributions, favoring one child as a fiduciary over another, etc., and can do a lot to reduce tension after you pass away.