The Best-Laid Plans

LIFE AT THE LAW FIRM Condon, Condon & Festa in Santa Monica, Calif., is usually pretty even-paced. Jeffrey Condon, a partner at the boutique estate-planning firm, says that he normally sees about six new clients and two or three existing ones per week. Then terror struck on Sept. 11, and shortly thereafter, Condon's phones started ringing off the hook.

Before long, Condon was in the office until after 9 every night, holding back-to-back appointments with anxious clients. "I was really swamped, but it's not the way I want to get business," says Condon, adding that his business has been up 50% since that fall day. There was the young couple with a two-year-old child and a father who traveled constantly, who were worried about how to provide for their daughter should both parents die in an accident. Then there was the couple with children from previous marriages who wanted to find a way to share their combined wealth so that all of their kids would benefit. "They always said that they would get around to it, but when Sept. 11 came along, it showed them that anything can happen at any time," says Condon.

Certainly, estate planners aren't used to being popular. Indeed, "most people would rather have a couple of root canals than do an estate plan," says Black Mountain, N.C.-based family-business consultant Gerald Le Van.

A lingering sense of doom since September hasn't been the only inspiration, though. The Economic Growth and Tax Relief Reconciliation Act, signed into law in June 2001, has changed the landscape of estate-tax law, most markedly, implementing a gradual increase over the next decade in the cut-off for federal estate-tax exemption. In 2001 your estate was exempt from estate taxes if your total was below $675,000. This year the exemption is $1 million per individual ($2 million for a married couple) and will rise to $2 million per individual in 2006 and then $3.5 million per individual in 2009. In 2010 the estate tax will be repealed for one year, but — unless Congress takes action at that point — it will revert the next year to its current status, making the exemption $1 million again. For anyone whose estate falls somewhere within those rising levels, it's tempting to overhaul your estate plan to accommodate what is about to become a moving target.

But positioning your estate for such a preemptive strike is "kind of like the tail wagging the dog," says Kevin Meuse, an attorney at the Boston firm Kirkpatrick & Lockhart. Estate planning is really about taking care of the people you love. To achieve this, you need the basics: a will, a living will, powers of attorney and, for some people, a living trust. Once these structures are inplace, then you can focus on trying to beat the IRS.

So even if you're not feeling particularly paranoid, now is a good time to make sure your estate plan is on course, whether you're starting it from scratch or updating an existing one. We'll make it painless: We've talked with dozens of estate attorneys across the country for up-to-date advice on everything from setting up a living trust — which can govern the distribution of your assets when you die, or even before then — to passing an entire house to an heir tax-free. Our aim is both to light enough of a fire under you to send you to your lawyer's office and to arm you with enough information to save you time and money when you get there. Once you're done, then you can go back to denying your own mortality, guilt-free.

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