Welcome back to the Oxendine Law podcast. Jared Oxendine and Christine Palmer >> here again to help you with your family law and divorce needs. Today we're going to talk about something new that we haven't talked about and that is how divorce will affect your estate planning documents. In other words, why you need to update those documents after you get divorced. Um, so Christine, first thing I want people to know is that if you already have estate planning documents in place, so let's say you've got um a life insurance policy in place and you've got your spouse named as a beneficiary on the life insurance policy or you've got your spouse named as beneficiaries on financial accounts, beneficiary on your will. If you've already filed for divorce, you actually can't change it during the divorce process. There's actually a order that applies in most counties in the state of Georgia that goes into effect on every single case that's filed that actually says you cannot change those things while the case is pending. And the reason is if something happens to you during the divorce before you've separated your assets, then that person should be the person to inherit those assets. And so courts don't want you changing beneficiary designation while the case is pending. However, that's different once the case is finalized. Right? Once the case is finalized, you know what's yours. You know what is your spouse's and they're entitled to that and nothing more. So, at that point is actually very important for you to go ahead and update your beneficiary designations on your life insurance on your financial accounts. Update your will to change your beneficiary from your spouse. Some people have financial power of attorneys where they've designated their spouse to be able to make decisions for their finances if they can't do so on their own. And then healthc care directives. They've designated their spouse to make medical decisions for them. Once your divorce is finalized, you can and should quickly update those. >> That's right. It just it prevents the situation in the future. Like, you know, the divorce process for everyone is complicated. Even like myself, I'm divorced. I do divorce law. That doesn't mean I didn't run into things. I'll give you guys a pro tip. I had no idea when I got divorced personally that if I didn't update my W4 form, I would owe a lot of taxes the first year that I was divorced. Um, and that's because they were withholding me at a spousal income, dual income rate. So, there's a lesson I learned the hard way. There's just a lot of things that you don't think about. And I think you fight so hard through you're going through all the bank accounts and all the bank statements and everything and you got marital balance sheets and the numbers are going back and forth. When you get done, you just want to exhale and you want to be done. But there is that last step of waiting until it's final and then making sure that you have properly updated every beneficiary, every pod on a little checking account, bank account, update all of that. do get your new will in place and your new healthcare directives, power of attorneys, anything that you need to update and get those in place because what you'll run into even though a divorce may and the word is may have severed some of those ties, you don't want your children having to find out the hard way through probate court if it did or did not successfully sever the ties. So, um whether it's to go to your kids or another family member or if you do intentionally want for some reason a former spouse, let's just say that your children are very young and for a period of time you want to keep that life insurance in this kid's dad's name or the kid's mom's name, just make sure that you've updated it in the proper way so that they don't just have cart blanc. At least it's they're the beneficiary for the kids. So, there's a lot of um contributing factors that you need to consider. In our settlement agreements, we always include that clause just in case as the extra protection of safeguard that your spouse is waving any claim they have in your estate. In most settlement agreements, some attorneys miss it. We don't. But even if that's in your settlement agreement, you still want to update these things. And here's an example I give you. Okay, great. You've got a will that you prepared years before you got divorced. And obviously you have a settlement agreement or a divorce order in your case that says the other party waves any claim they have in your estate. that probably would be okay. You don't want to have to put yourself in that situation arguing otherwise or your heirs. You don't put your heirs in the situation of having to argue. Well, even though the will says the expouse gets all the money that predated the day of the divorce and they wave their right, that may be successful, it may not. But think about a financial power of attorney or an advanced directive that's not waved by signing the settlement agreement. So, when somebody signs that settlement agreement in their divorce, it says they're waving any right they have in your estate and then you pass away, but you still have a healthc care directive that appoints your expouse as a person in charge of making medical decisions for you. That's not waved by signing the settlement agreement in your divorce case. Do you really want to be in a situation where you are incapacitated in the hospital and you can't make decisions on what type of medical treatment you want and then they call your expouse to come in and make those decisions for you? That could be a little scary depending on what your relationship is with your ex- spouse. So that's why it's important to be safe, not sorry. Update all your beneficiary designations, life insurance beneficiary designations, financial account beneficiary designations. Update those wills. updates those fi financial power of attorneys and the healthc care directives and you'll be good to go. Pretty straightforward. Again, we try to keep it straightforward for you guys. Thanks for joining in. Again, offices in the greater Athens area in the greater Atlanta area located in Swani. So, we're serving all of metro Atlanta. We're serving all of greater Athens area. That's going to include Okone County, Clark County, we got Jackson County up there, Barrow County, Walton County. So, we are certainly here and able and ready to help anyone in those areas with all your divorce and family law needs. Make sure you subscribe wherever you're listening and don't forget to hit that subscribe button on YouTube so that you'll be the first to know about additional podcast. As always, we appreciate you joining. See you next time.