Addie Prewitt Live: Back to Basics on Wills in Louisiana

Estate PlanningAddie Prewitt Live

Jun 23

Written By Addie Prewitt

Back to Basics: Wills in Louisiana

Check out all episodes of Addie Prewitt Live here or on YouTube. Be sure to like, follow, and subscribe!

Episode 11 - Back to Basics of Wills in Louisiana

June 1, 2022 @ 12:30pm CST

Hey everyone. Thanks for showing up to Addie Prewitt live today.

I'm Addie Prewitt, a New Orleans-based estate planning attorney. I'm a mother of two small boys and my husband and I own a couple of independent pharmacies in the New Orleans area. So we have a lot going on.

I'm so glad y'all could make it today. And what I wanted to start with was Back to Basics: Do I need a will?

So I guess the first thing to talk about is sort of what a will is. It pretty simply can be boiled down to a couple of things. It's a legally binding document that says where you want your property to go when you die and who you want to be in charge of that process. We typically refer to that person as the executor. So two things:

Where you want the property to go and
Who gets to be in charge of that process?

So I think the easiest way to think about who needs a will or whether you need a will, is what happens if you don't have a will. If you don't have a will, the state decides where your property goes, every state, including Louisiana has the laws of intestacy and they say in the event, you die without a will. Here's how your property goes first to this person, then to that person, then to this person. So if you don't want that to happen, you have to have a will.

It's that simple.

Otherwise the state gives according to the laws of intestacy. A couple of people, I will say, who should definitely have a will if you are married, especially in Louisiana, especially if you had stuff before you were married. So Louisiana is a community property state whether your property is community or separate determines where it goes under the laws of intestacy.

So if you're married, you need a will. If you have children, especially if they are under the age of 18, they are minors. A will is a primary way that people will designate who can be a guardian of their children. If something should happen to both of the parents and guardian (in Louisiana, it's called a tutor.) So if you're doing a Louisiana will, you may not even see the word guardian. It's referred to as a tutor, but that's the way you can say, you know, I want my sister or I want my brother to raise these children.

If something happens to me, a third question that we kind of want to talk about, let's say you are married, you have children, and you had property before you were married, such as me and my spouse each had a house when we met in that case, you definitely want to have a will.

The laws of intestacy whether it's separate property or community property might leave the house to your children rather than to your spouse, which is probably not how most people want that to happen. So it's really important to have a will in those circumstances.

The next thing I think is helpful to think about is what do you have? How much property do you have? So let's say you're single. You have a bank account, you have a house, you have a car you'll definitely want to have a will in those circumstances, you don't want the state to decide.

And I see a lot of people say net worth of over a hundred thousand dollars, but really, you know, having dealt with, I think, you know, even having a bank account is enough. It's sufficient enough to trigger whether or not you should have a will because when someone goes to sort of get those proceeds and distribute them out, you know, the banks will make you make you hop through all of the hoops to do that. So if you have a will and someone appointed as executor, it makes it a heck of a lot easier to get that done.

Now are there any times where having a will doesn't really help. There actually are some assets that don't go through your will. The primary ones that we see are life insurance and retirement benefits. Those will always pass according to your beneficiary designation.

So whether you're saying your will, I want my proceeds in my life insurance to go to X. That's not really going to control it. That beneficiary designation is really going to control. And a lot of times you'll have people like me or even financial planners say, make sure you review those and make sure you update those.

But it's really important, particularly if you have big life circumstances, such as you got married, you're getting divorced, you had children, starting a new job, retiring. Those are all really good reasons to take a look at that and make sure it's the way you want it to go.

So actually in the Instagram feed, we had a couple of questions come in, which was awesome. So if you ever are in that circumstance and have some questions, let us know. The first question, where do I practice? I practice in Louisiana. I am barred and licensed here, and went to law school here. I have worked in New York city and Atlanta as a tax consultant. So I didn't have to be barred in those states, but I am actually born in Texas, although I've never practiced there. So that's a little bit about me.

The next question we had is what's the right age to create a will, and that's a great question. So anyone over the age of 18 has the legal capacity to create a will, especially in Louisiana. I don't know about other states, but this is Louisiana. We're talking about you know, an 18 year old may not have many assets, so you don't typically see them creating a will, but you know, some of the other things that we talked about before such as, you know, having a bank account, buying a car, having a house, even, even young people can have those at the sites of assets. And it's very important that, you know, if they're doing that sort of process, they should definitely think about it.

I would say. Yeah, definitely by your thirties, be thinking about it, be thinking about where you might want your property to go if something happened to you.

So those are all the questions that came in today. I hope you enjoyed the video. Be sure to like, follow, subscribe to all the stuff on the social media networks.

You can find out any more information about me or catch up on any other videos at www.addieprewittlaw.com .

And that's all I have for you today.

Thanks for watching. Hope you guys have a great day!