Estate Planning for People Who Keep Meaning to Get Around to It
You don't need a massive estate to need an estate plan. You need people you love, accounts with your name on them, and the intention to make sure things go the way you'd want if you weren't around to explain it.
What a CFP® Does in Estate Planning — and Where an Attorney Takes Over
Estate planning involves two distinct layers, and understanding which is which saves a lot of confusion.
The legal layer — drafting a will, establishing a trust, creating a power of attorney or healthcare directive — requires an estate attorney. Kirstin is a CFP®, not an attorney, and that distinction matters. She won't draft your legal documents.
What she does is the financial coordination layer that most people skip entirely, and that omission is where estate plans quietly fall apart:
Beneficiary designation review:
Who is named on your retirement accounts, life insurance policies, and investment accounts — and does it reflect your actual wishes today, not who you named in 2011?
Account titling:
How accounts are titled determines how they pass at death. Joint tenancy, transfer-on-death designations, and trust ownership all have different implications.
Wealth transfer strategy:
How do you move assets to the people you intend, in the most tax-efficient way available?
Legal professional coordination:
When your situation calls for an estate attorney, Kirstin helps you understand what you need from that conversation and connects you with the right professional to complete the picture.
The financial and legal layers of estate planning need to work together. Artfx handles one and helps you navigate the other.
The Beneficiary Designation Problem Almost Everyone Has
Here's a question worth sitting with: when did you last look at the beneficiary designation on your 401(k) or IRA?
For most people, the answer is "when I opened the account" — which might have been a decade or more ago. Before a marriage, a divorce, the birth of a child, the death of a parent. Beneficiary designations override your will. Whatever name is on that form is where the money goes, regardless of what your will says or what you intended.
Reviewing and updating beneficiary designations across retirement accounts, life insurance policies, and investment accounts is one of the highest-impact steps in estate planning — and one of the most commonly skipped. It takes far less time than most people expect. The consequences of skipping it can take years to untangle.
When You Are the Business, Your Estate Plan Has an Extra Layer
For self-employed professionals and freelancers, estate planning involves a dimension that traditional employee-focused planning rarely addresses: what happens to the business when something happens to you?
If you're a sole proprietor or single-member LLC, your client relationships, active contracts, and income streams may not transfer automatically — and your family's financial stability may depend on how clearly that's been thought through in advance. That includes income replacement planning, identifying who could manage or wind down your business affairs, and making sure your insurance coverage accounts for the gap.
This isn't a reason to panic. It's a reason to plan. We help self-employed clients think through the full picture — including the parts that don't fit neatly into a standard estate planning checklist.
How Estate Planning Connects to the Rest of Your Financial Picture
Estate planning doesn't live in a separate compartment from the rest of your finances. Every major financial decision has estate implications, and those implications need to be coordinated rather than handled in isolation.
Your retirement accounts need beneficiary designations that align with your overall plan. Your life insurance coverage needs to be sized against your actual income replacement needs and debt obligations. If you're saving for a child's or grandchild's education through a 529 or UTMA account, the ownership structure of those accounts affects how they transfer. These aren't separate conversations — they're the same one.
At Artfx, estate planning coordination is built into the holistic planning relationship rather than treated as a standalone task you handle with a different professional and never revisit.
Questions About Estate Planning and What a CFP® Can Do
How does a financial advisor help with estate planning?
A CFP® handles the financial coordination layer — beneficiary designation reviews, account titling, wealth transfer strategy, and helping you understand when and how to work with an estate attorney. The legal documents (will, trust, power of attorney) are drafted by an attorney. The two layers need to work together, and Artfx helps make sure they do.
Do I need a financial advisor for estate planning if I already have an estate attorney?
They serve different functions. An estate attorney drafts your legal documents. A CFP® makes sure the financial structure underneath those documents — account titling, beneficiary designations, insurance coverage, retirement account strategy — is aligned with your actual intentions. Most people need both, working in coordination.
When should I review my estate plan?
Any major life change is a trigger: marriage, divorce, the birth or adoption of a child, the death of a beneficiary, a significant change in assets, or a move to a different state. If none of those apply and it's been more than three to five years since you last looked, that's also a reason to review.
What estate planning do self-employed professionals need that employees don't?
At minimum, a plan for what happens to your business, client relationships, and active contracts if you're unable to work or die unexpectedly. Income replacement planning and business continuity are layers that standard estate planning templates don't always address. We build those into the conversation for self-employed clients.
I've never done any estate planning at all — is it too late to start?
No. The right time to start was earlier; the second-best time is now. We work with plenty of clients who are starting from zero — no will, beneficiary designations that haven't been touched in years, no clear plan. That's a completely workable starting point.