A life estate is created when someone gives the current rights to real estate to a third party (or retains these rights themselves), while giving the rights to that same piece of property to someone else after the holder of the current rights passes on.
Sometimes a Will is not well thought out.
Sometimes things simply have changed since the Will was written.
It is important to transfer assets into your trust, if you have a trust at least in part because you want to avoid probate.
If you become incompetent (technically, in Oregon, this is called financially incapable) and are unable to handle your finances, someone will have to do this for you.
If a child lives in their parent’s house, and provides a certain level of care for the parent, for at least two years, the parent can give the house to the child without creating a period of Medicaid ineligibility.
If you have no estate plan and are married and have no children, or if you are married and all of your children are also the children of your spouse, your spouse will inherit everything that passes through your probate.
An estate plan, depending on the complexity, can range from a few hundred dollars to a few thousand dollars.
People are often anxious to avoid estate taxes when they pass on.
Federal estate taxes are no longer a problem for most people, since there is no federal estate tax unless the estate is over $11.2 million dollars.
At one time not too long ago, federal estate taxes (death taxes) started at $600,000.
Many people have or had the potential to have to pay estate taxes if they had savings, retirement accounts, and/or a house, when estate tax was due on amounts over $600,000.
It is only a slight exaggeration to say that federal estate taxes are not a worry for most people unless they have (or control, or have given away) well over eleven million dollars ($11,200,000 to be precise).