If you find yourself moving into your second marriage, you’ll need to answer a variety of questions regarding your finances and future.
Most importantly, you should review your current estate plan with the idea of making changes that suit both your existing and new families.
First things first, you must decide who to include in your new estate plan. While you may eliminate your ex-spouse, you’ll probably want to keep any children from your first marriage in your estate plan.
From there, focus on things such as:
- The items that you brought into the marriage: For example, if you’re bringing significant assets into a second marriage, you may wish to keep them separate.
- Your age: This will impact many areas of your estate plan, such as what you keep separate and what you commingle, as well as the steps you take when creating a plan.
- Your beneficiaries: This can be tricky with a second marriage, especially in the event that you have children from your first marriage. Will you leave everything to your new spouse? Will you leave everything to your children from your first marriage? How about any children from your new marriage? There’s a lot to consider, so you need to look at this from every possible angle.
Estate planning after a second marriage may not be the most exciting thing you do, but it’s important to take action as soon as possible.
Once you know what to review and how to attack this with your new family, you can begin to make decisions that suit all the important people in your life.
