Becky Cholewka: Some of the most complex planning we do is for blended families. Blended families is what I call the Brady Bunch. They’re children from a different relationship, whether both husband and wife have children from another relationship or just one of them do.
The reason why this type of complaining is so complex is there’re other issues that we need to contemplate. For example, if something happens to the first spouse, do you want their children to be taken care of? Do we want all of the children to be taken care of? Do we want to make a contract that says, “You can’t change beneficiaries after one person dies”?
There’s lots of intricate details and goals that we want to make sure that we’re meeting when we’re drafting these documents.
When we have blended families, those documents typically tend to be the most comprehensive plans that we draw, again, just because we have more complexities that we don’t have in a nuclear family. 75 percent of us at some time are going to be in blended family. That’s the new statistic, whether that’s because of a divorce and the remarriage, or whether because of a death and remarriage.
At some point in our life, the large majority of us are going to have to start contemplating some of these more detailed issues that we are going to need to be able to address in our legal documents to make sure that all of your family and all of your goals are truly going to be provided for them protected.
We hope you come and see us at Cholewka Law if you’re blended family. It’s actually one of the areas we love working in the most because of the difficulty of it. Have a nice day everyone.
