Submitted by Christopher S. Nudo on
hello my name is Anthony Davis I'm one of the attorneys that works with Christopher Nudo we're located in Rolling Meadows and Elgin and my main focus area is estate planning but our Law Firm also does probate as well as real estate in some commercial law as well today I wanted to talk to you a little bit kind of give you the basics of Estate Planning and give you a broad overview of how it is that trusts wills and Estates work so to start things off when we start out in our life we've got a group of loved ones and then we also have a small pile of assets But as time goes on that group of loved ones will grow and grow and grow and that pile of assets that we have will grow and grow and grow at a certain point in time we have to figure out how is it that we're going to get those assets to our loved ones in the easiest and least aggravating way possible and that's the problem that we're trying to to solve through estate planning when somebody passes away in Illinois the most common way that their estate is going to be handled is it's going to be taken through the probate court system what probate is is it is a very creditor focused court system and what that means is that a probate court wants to let any creditors that may or may not exist out there know that someone has passed away so that those creditors can attach to the estate and that they can be paid whatever is owed to them out of the estate after they've been satisfied at that point then the Probate Court will distribute the remaining assets to the loved ones how that distribution is made is going to be determined in one of two ways if we have an instrument in place called a will what that will will do is provide direction for those assets to the people that you've designed designated in the will and wills are good instruments they're good instruments because they do a couple things first thing is when somebody passes away there tends to be a lot of emotions that are running in the family um and also everybody kind of has a different movie playing in their head so what the will does is it comes out and it allows you to definitively State what it is that you wanted to have happen remove a lot of that subjectivity and remove a lot of that anxiety from the equation so that people can just focus on what they need to focus on if we don't have a will in place than what the probate judge will do is look at something called the probate statute and with the probate statute is just a one-size-fits-all hierarchy that tells the judge how it is that the remainder of the state should be distributed well Wills are good documents they do require probate and probate does doesn't necessarily have the best reputation and the reason that a lot of my clients don't like probate is just because of the time and expense that it requires so when an estate is being taken through probate it will typically take about a year sometimes longer from beginning to conclusion for it to be finally resolved and then in addition it's rather expensive so right now even a simple probate is typically going to cost about five thousand dollars in various legal fees filing fees and so on in order for the family to close it out and if it's a little bit more expensive it can go um up to about 7 500 and if it's contested I'm even more expensive than that so A lot of times my clients are looking to avoid probate if that is a goal that a client has then what we typically do is we start talking about an instrument called a trust if you go online and research about trusts I feel a lot of the information is very confusing the way that it's presented there's a lot of legalese and to just make it very very accessible very very easy to understand all that a trust is is a big contract that's it so if you're having a trust drafted what you're doing is you're going to an attorney and you're having that attorney draft for you a custom private contract that privately distributes the assets rather than having to go through the public probate court system and that's that's all that trusts wills and Estates are if if you have any questions feel free to reach out to me you can see that I've got my contact info in the video but I'd love to hear from you
