Lessons To Learn From Gene Hackman

If you have been keeping up on the news, you will have heard that famous actor, Gene Hackman, passed away in February. His passing has brought with it a legal mess surrounding his estate. 

As you may know, an estate plan can help prevent your estate from going through the courts in a long, and sometimes expensive process. It helps ensure that your wishes are heard and that what you want to happen with your estate, happens. 

In the case with Gene Hackman, he had an estate plan and he had decided to leave everything to his wife. Which, is perfectly fine and acceptable. However, his wife passed away a few days before Gene did, making her unable to be the trustee. 

Estate plans have contingencies for situations for situations like that and there is usually a backup listed in the case that the trustee dies first or is otherwise unable to be the trustee, and normally, it works out. However, in Gene Hackman’s case, the backup trustee died back in 2019, and the estate plan was never updated to reflect a new backup trustee, leaving Gene Hackman’s estate with nowhere to go and no one to oversee it. Because it wasn’t updated, and there were no trustees to handle it, the courts had to step in and assign a temporary trustee in order to handle the estate, and it will have to go through the long, and expensive court process that should have been avoided by having an estate plan. 

This just goes to show the importance of having an estate plan, but also in making sure that it stays updated and reflects life changes, otherwise, as we can see with the Gene Hackman case, things can end up going south quickly, and your family can find themselves having to deal with the unnecessary headache of probate court along with having to deal with their grief over losing their loved one. 

Whether you need to create an estate plan or update one you already have, Irvine Legal is here to help secure the future of your estate. 

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