Knowing Where You are Today

The first step in developing an effective estate plan is knowing exactly where you are today. By that, we mean that you need to take a snapshot of both your personal and family information and your personal financial information as they exist today. That's important because it will give you a good idea where things stand for you in terms of income, assets, current spending, and other financial obligations.

Don't worry - no one will see this information unless you specifically authorize it. In addition, it means you have to take a snapshot of who you turn to for advice regarding your personal and financial affairs.

Why is it important to know where you are today? Because it's very difficult to accomplish anything unless you have a starting point. You can't even read a road map these days unless you know where you are on the map. The same is true with estate planning. If you want to set certain goals for your family, you have to know what resources will be available to accomplish those goals. It's the starting point from which you can build an effective estate plan.

We've put together three different workbooks to help you gather and organize your personal information. The first workbook is designed to collect all your personal and family information. We call this workbook, as you might guess, the "Personal and Family Information Workbook." The second workbook is designed to collect all your personal financial information. Not surprisingly, we call that workbook the "Personal Financial Information Workbook." The third workbook is designed to collect the necessary information about your professional advisors. You guessed it - we call that workbook, "Your Professional Advisors."

You should know, too, that the workbooks used throughout this My Plan^SM section consist of Adobe fillable PDF forms that can be saved on your own computer. Once you have saved these forms on your own completer, you can go back and edit the data at any time, then re-save it, and print it out at your convenience.

We've chosen these Adobe fillable PDF forms because you may be hesitant to input your highly personal information to a database that you have no control over. Identity theft is on everyone's mind - and we don't want to have you choose between protecting your identity and protecting your family. With Adobe fillable PDF forms, you have the best of both worlds - you'll be able to focus on your estate planning because you'll know that your personal information is fully protected. That's because none of your personal information ever leaves your own computer. Once entered into our Adobe fillable PDF forms, it can only be saved on your personal computer - not on our website or any internet database.

So, let's get started! Just click on the buttons below to access these 3 workbooks.