Is Your Estate Plan Running on Floppy Disks?
Somewhere in an attic, a basement, or that one drawer in the kitchen nobody opens, there's a stack of media you cannot read. VHS tapes. A Zip drive. A CD-ROM with the family vacation photos from 2003. The information is technically still there. You just have absolutely no way to get to it.
Estate plans can end up in a similar place.
When you signed your estate plan, it was state-of-the-art. The fonts were crisp. Your attorney used phrases like "robust" and "comprehensive." You filed it away, told yourself you were officially A Responsible Adult, and then never thought about it again — which, to be fair, is what most of us do with anything legal.
But laws changed. Your family changed. The tax code changed roughly forty-seven times. And that perfectly good estate plan you set up back in 2009 may now have the modern utility of a fax machine.
Outdated Doesn't Mean Broken
Your estate plan probably still "works." It will, in the legal sense, distribute your assets. So will a coin flip and a heated family argument, technically. The real question isn't whether it works. It's whether it works well — for the life you have now, not the one you had when "Slumdog Millionaire" won Best Picture.
A common example: many older estate plans were built around estate tax exemptions that were dramatically lower than today's. Back then, splitting assets into a maze of sub-trusts at death made real sense. It saved money. It was clever. It was the financial equivalent of programming your VCR.
Today, federal estate tax exemptions are nearly $10 million higher per person than they were a decade ago. That elaborate sub-trust structure, lovingly designed to protect your family from a tax bill that no longer exists, is now mostly serving to make your surviving spouse fill out paperwork. For years.
Life Has a Way of Updating Without You
Even if the law had stood perfectly still — it didn't, but pretend — life moves on its own schedule. Since you signed your estate plan:
Someone got married. Someone got divorced. Someone got married again, possibly to a person you have feelings about.
A grandchild was born. Then another. Then, somehow, several more.
Your finances look different. (Hopefully better. If worse, definitely review the plan.)
The brother-in-law you named as trustee is no longer your top choice, for reasons you'd rather not put in writing.
An estate plan that doesn't know any of this is one making decisions on your behalf based on a version of your family that no longer exists. It's not malicious. It's just out of date — like a GPS that keeps directing you to a Blockbuster.
When to Take Another Look
Every three to five years is a reasonable interval. Sooner if anything significant happens — a marriage, a death, a major financial shift, a tax overhaul, or a quiet suspicion that you can't quite remember what's in there.
Most reviews don't require dramatic action. Often it's a small tweak: a new trustee, a clarified phrase, an updated beneficiary. Occasionally a full restatement makes sense, particularly if the original document is doing things the law no longer requires it to do. (See: sub-trusts, above.)
The goal isn't perfection. Estate plans aren't meant to be flawless monuments. They're tools — ones that should still match the life and the laws around them.
A Modest Suggestion
If you can't remember the last time you reviewed your estate plan, or you're not entirely sure where it is, that's your sign. Pull it out. Brush off the dust. See what it actually says.
A good estate plan should feel like a current document — clear, relevant, and ready when it's needed. Not a time capsule. Not an artifact. And definitely not something that requires specialized equipment to play back.