Article On Lifetime And Post-Mortem Wills, Trusts, And Charitable Planning

Russell N. James III (Professor in the Department of Personal Financial Planning, Texas Tech University) recently published an article entitled, The New Statistics of Estate Planning: Lifetime and Post-Mortem Wills, Trusts, and Charitable Planning, Texas Tech University School of Law, Estate Planning & Community Property Law Journal, Vol. 8 Book 1, Fall (2015). Provided below is an abstract of the article:

What is “new” in estate planning?  As always, there are new cases, new legislation, new regulations, and new drafting approaches.  Beyond these typical new legal developments, there are now new demographics and statistics.  These demographics and statistics are new for two reasons. 

First, the upcoming demographics of the nation—especially among older adults—will differ notably from any seen before in our history.  Not only will the size of the population in older age segments grow, but the characteristics of that population will differ substantially from previous generations.  The findings reported below suggest that many of these changes and differences are directly impacting the amount and type of estate planning that occurs, and will continue to do so.

Second, there is now a major source of new social science data on estate planning among older adults.  In the past, statistical research on estate planning habits was limited to IRS tax data, small samples of probate data, or a handful of one-time surveys on current opinions or planning circumstances; but that changed.  The Health and Retirement Study (HRS) –funded by the National Institute on Aging and administered by the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan—represents a major advance in our ability to track estate planning changes during life and distributions after death.