If you spent thousands of dollars on an estate plan in California, do you have to spend thousands more to update it now that you moved to Oregon? Not necessarily. According to the United States Constitution,  if your estate plan was legal in California when you executed it, it is legal here, too. In the big picture, if your California (or Nevada, or Washington, or Other State) estate plan expresses your wishes accurately, stick with it. This is true even if the plan is old and your kids aren’t really kids any more.

If you hire a lawyer, though, or even read a lawyer’s blog, it’s unlikely that you’ll glide blissfully through the blue sky of the big picture. Instead you’ll be yanked down in the murk to consider questions like these:

1. Have you reviewed your estate plan (i.e. your Will and/or Trust; your financial power of attorney; your medical directive) recently and do you understand what the plan is when you die and if you are alive but incapacitated? If the answer is no, and if you have tried to read those documents and they are written in indecipherable legalese, you can hire a lawyer to review them with you. You can’t determine whether your out-of-state estate plan expresses your wishes accurately unless you know what that plan says.

2. If you have reviewed your estate plan and understand it, does the plan assign a job (like financial agent with power of attorney or health care representative or personal representative or trustee) to someone who is deceased or no longer part of your life, or would you give that job to someone else, like your adult child, because your adult child is old enough to do the job now. If the answer is yes, this would be a good reason to update your estate plan.

3. Does the post-death plan include gifts that you would no longer make, or that you would make to different people, or that are to people who are now disabled, and the gift could jeopardize their eligibility for disability benefits. If the answer is yes, this would be a good reason to update your estate plan.

4. Are you worried about Oregon estate tax after creating an estate plan in a state in which you didn’t have to worry about State estate tax? Oregon taxes estates worth more than $1 million, and this relatively low exemption amount, in comparison to the exemption amounts of other states, influences the estate plans of many Oregonians. 

5. Your medical directive, in which you appoint a health care representative to direct your medical care if you can’t do it yourself and in which you provide direction regarding end-of-life care, is unfamiliar to Oregon medical professionals, who are used to reviewing the Oregon Advance Directive. Even though your directive may be clearer and more comprehensive than the Oregon Advance Directive, do you want to execute an Oregon Advance Directive for the benefit of the doctors/nurses who will be providing care to you in the future?

These questions are important ones to consider because the cost of an estate plan update could be substantial. I tell potential clients to stick with their existing estate plan, created in a different state, if it expresses their wishes, because if I have to amend their Will or their Trust it is like  starting over again. What seems like a minor change to them is a major one to me because I won’t draft a quick amendment to their Will or their Trust created under the laws of another state. I will create a new, restated document with the updated terms under the laws of Oregon, and charge for this work as if this is a brand new estate plan. Maybe this is what you have to do after considering your existing estate plan under the light of questions like those above. Just make sure.