Home / Estate Planning in Colorado
You spend your life making decisions for yourself and the people you care about.
Where to live. How to raise your family. What to build. What to save. What to invest in. What kind of business to create. What you want your future to look like.
Your estate plan is how you make sure some of the most important decisions don’t get left for someone else to make.
Kinney Buzek helps Colorado individuals, families, business owners and property owners create wills, trusts and comprehensive estate plans designed to protect the people and assets that matter to them.
A thoughtful estate plan can establish what happens to your property after your death, who can make important financial and healthcare decisions if you become incapacitated, and how your wishes should be carried out when you’re no longer able to explain them yourself.
That's part of our job.
We begin by understanding your family, assets, concerns and goals.
What do you own? Who depends on you? What are you trying to protect? What worries you? What would you want to happen if you couldn't make decisions yourself?
We'll explain the estate-planning strategies available to you in plain language.
That may include a will-based estate plan, trust-based estate plan or additional planning based on your family, business interests, mineral interests and other circumstances.
Together, we'll make the decisions that give the documents meaning: who should act for you, who should receive property, how assets should be managed and what protections may be appropriate.
We prepare the estate-planning documents and help you understand what each one does and how it fits into the larger strategy.
Once the documents are signed, we help identify the additional steps needed to make your plan work as intended, including appropriate asset coordination and trust funding.
Your life will continue to change. Your estate plan should be able to change with it.
It's About Having a Say in What Happens to It.
One of the biggest misconceptions about estate planning is that it’s only necessary after you’ve accumulated significant wealth.
That’s not really the question.
Do you have people you care about?
Do you own a home or other property?
Do you have retirement accounts or life insurance?
Do you own a business?
Do you have children?
Do you own mineral interests?
Would you want to choose who makes financial or healthcare decisions for you if you couldn’t make them yourself?
If the answer to any of those questions is yes, there are decisions worth making.
Without an appropriate estate plan, Colorado law may determine how certain property is distributed, and your family may need court involvement to resolve matters you could have addressed in advance.
A thoughtful estate plan puts more of those decisions where they belong:
With you.
An estate planning attorney helps you create a coordinated legal plan for what happens to you and your property if you become incapacitated or die.
That may involve preparing legal documents, but good estate planning goes beyond documents.
It requires understanding how your family, property, financial accounts, beneficiary designations, business interests and other assets fit together.
Depending on your circumstances, your estate plan may help you:
The goal isn’t simply to create documents. It’s to create a plan in which the documents, assets and people all work together.
It's About Having a Say in What Happens to It.
There isn’t one document called an “estate plan.”
A comprehensive estate plan may include several documents and strategies, each designed to accomplish a different job.
A last will and testament allows you to provide instructions for property governed by your will, nominate a personal representative to administer your estate and address important family matters such as guardianship for minor children.
But having a will does not necessarily mean your estate will avoid probate.
And your will doesn’t necessarily control every asset you own.
Retirement accounts, life insurance, jointly owned property, trusts and accounts with beneficiary designations may transfer differently.
That’s why creating a will without considering the rest of your financial life can leave important gaps.
A revocable living trust can hold and manage assets during your lifetime and establish instructions for how those assets should be managed or distributed after your death.
Trust-based estate planning may be useful for families who want greater control over distributions, have particular concerns about beneficiaries, own complex assets, or want to reduce the amount of property that may ultimately require probate administration.
A durable financial power of attorney is one of the most important documents you can include in an estate plan.
It allows you to choose someone you trust to manage financial and legal matters on your behalf and, when properly structured as durable, allows that authority to continue if you become incapacitated.
Depending on the authority you grant, your agent may be able to pay bills, manage bank accounts and investments, handle real estate matters, address tax and insurance matters, manage certain business interests, and take care of other important financial responsibilities.
Without a durable financial power of attorney in place, even a spouse or close family member may not automatically have the authority to access or manage everything that needs attention. If you become incapacitated without this document, your family may have to seek court involvement to obtain authority to act on your behalf.
That is why a durable financial power of attorney should be prepared before it is needed. Once you no longer have the legal capacity required to execute the document, your family cannot simply create one for you.
The question isn’t only who you trust. It’s whether the person you trust will have the legal authority to act when you need them most.
Kinney Buzek can help you establish a durable financial power of attorney that reflects your circumstances, your assets, and the authority you want your chosen agent to have.
A medical durable power of attorney allows you to choose the person you trust to make healthcare decisions for you if you become unable to make or communicate those decisions yourself.
Your agent may need to speak with physicians, evaluate treatment options, consent to or decline certain medical care, and make difficult decisions at a time when you cannot provide direction yourself.
Without a medical durable power of attorney, the person you would want making those decisions may not necessarily be the person with clear legal authority to do so. Uncertainty can also create additional stress or disagreement among family members during an already difficult time.
Choosing your healthcare agent in advance gives you the opportunity to decide who should speak for you and to discuss your wishes with that person before a medical crisis occurs.
If you couldn’t speak for yourself tomorrow, who would you want making your healthcare decisions — and would that person have the authority to do it?
Kinney Buzek can help you document that choice as part of a coordinated estate plan.
Choosing who can make healthcare decisions is only part of planning for incapacity. An advance directive or living will helps document what you want regarding certain medical treatment and end-of-life decisions if you are unable to communicate those wishes yourself.
Depending on your circumstances and the documents used, your healthcare planning may address life-sustaining treatment and other important medical decisions. Appropriate healthcare information authorizations may also be included so the people who need information about your care can obtain it when necessary.
Putting these wishes in writing can provide important guidance to your healthcare providers and the people you love. It can also reduce the burden on family members who might otherwise be asked to make extraordinarily difficult decisions without knowing what you would have wanted.
These documents work together but serve different purposes:
Your Durable Financial Power of Attorney answers: Who can manage my financial affairs if I cannot?
Your Medical Durable Power of Attorney answers: Who can make healthcare decisions for me if I cannot?
Your Advance Directive or Living Will answers: What are my wishes regarding certain medical care if I cannot communicate them myself?
Kinney Buzek can help you put these documents in place as part of an estate plan designed to protect you during your lifetime — not just determine what happens to your assets after your death.
Probate is the legal process that may be required to administer and transfer certain property after someone dies.
Not every asset goes through probate. How property is titled, whether beneficiaries have been properly designated, and whether a trust or other planning tools are in place can all affect how assets are transferred.
A thoughtful estate plan considers probate before it becomes an issue. The goal isn’t necessarily to avoid probate at all costs, but to understand which assets may be subject to the process and structure your estate in a way that makes sense for you and the people you leave behind.
Good estate planning doesn’t begin after someone dies. It helps determine what happens when that time comes.
Kinney Buzek can help you understand how your estate plan may affect the probate process and whether additional planning could make the eventual administration of your estate simpler for your family.
Retirement accounts, life insurance policies and certain financial accounts may transfer according to beneficiary designations rather than instructions in your will.
That means you can have beautifully prepared estate-planning documents and still create an unintended result if your beneficiary designations don’t match the overall plan.
Kinney Buzek helps clients consider these assets as part of the larger estate-planning strategy.
Signing a binder full of estate-planning documents doesn’t necessarily mean the planning is finished.
For a trust-based estate plan, assets may need to be properly titled or coordinated with the trust.
Beneficiary designations may need to be reviewed.
Real property may require deeds.
Business interests may need to be addressed.
Mineral interests shouldn’t simply be forgotten because they aren’t sitting in a traditional bank account.
This implementation work matters.
A plan that isn’t properly connected to the assets it was designed to protect may not work the way you expected when your family needs it most.
Your Plan Isn't Just About Who Gets What.
For parents, estate planning can answer questions that are much more personal than dividing property.
– Who would care for your children if something happened to both parents?
Who would manage money on their behalf?
At what age should a child receive an inheritance?
Should they receive everything at once?
What if a child has special needs?
What if you want different people responsible for raising your children and managing the assets you’ve left for them?
These aren’t decisions most parents enjoy contemplating.
But making them yourself can spare the people you love from having to make those decisions during an already difficult time.
Your Business Is Part of Your Estate, Too.
For many entrepreneurs, their company represents years of work and a significant portion of their wealth.
Yet business ownership is frequently overlooked in personal estate planning.
– What happens to your ownership interest if you die?
– Who has authority if you become incapacitated?
– Can the company continue operating?
– Does an operating agreement or buy-sell arrangement affect your estate plan?
– Should ownership eventually pass to family members, business partners or someone else?
– How will your family receive value from the business you’ve built?
Business succession and estate planning shouldn’t be treated as completely separate conversations.
The business needs a future plan because the owner does, too.
Mineral interests can create estate-planning considerations that aren’t always obvious.
An interest may have been retained when land was sold decades ago, inherited from previous generations or produce royalty income today. Ownership can also become increasingly divided as mineral interests pass through a family.
For mineral owners, an estate plan should consider how those interests are titled, how they will transfer, who will manage them and how they fit into the family’s broader plan.
This is an area where Kinney Buzek brings a particularly distinctive perspective because estate planning and mineral-rights law exist within the same practice. (Unique expertise working with CO mineral / land owners)
An estate plan isn’t something you create once, put in a drawer and assume will still make sense decades later.
Life changes. Families change. Assets change. Businesses grow. Relationships change. Laws change.
Your estate plan should be reviewed periodically and when significant changes occur involving your marriage, children, property, business, wealth, health, mineral ownership or the people you’ve named to carry out important responsibilities.
The plan should continue to reflect the life you’re actually living, not the life you had when the documents were signed.
It's About Deciding What Should Happen If It Does.
Most of us spend far more time planning vacations, careers, businesses and retirement than thinking about what would happen if we suddenly couldn’t make decisions for ourselves.
That’s understandable.
Creating an estate plan doesn’t mean you’re expecting the worst.
It means you’ve taken responsibility for decisions that could otherwise be left to the people you love, the courts or state law.
You built the life. You should have a say in what happens to it.
Kinney Buzek Law Firm helps Colorado individuals, families, business owners and property owners create estate plans designed around the people and assets that matter to them.
That's part of our job.
We begin by understanding your family, assets, concerns and goals.
What do you own? Who depends on you? What are you trying to protect? What worries you? What would you want to happen if you couldn't make decisions yourself?
We'll explain the estate-planning strategies available to you in plain language.
That may include a will-based estate plan, trust-based estate plan or additional planning based on your family, business interests, mineral interests and other circumstances.
Together, we'll make the decisions that give the documents meaning: who should act for you, who should receive property, how assets should be managed and what protections may be appropriate.
We prepare the estate-planning documents and help you understand what each one does and how it fits into the larger strategy.
Once the documents are signed, we help identify the additional steps needed to make your plan work as intended, including appropriate asset coordination and trust funding.
Your life will continue to change. Your estate plan should be able to change with it.
We’ll help you understand what comes next.
It depends on your assets, family circumstances and goals. A will-based estate plan may be appropriate for some people, while others may benefit from a trust-based strategy to manage assets, control distributions or reduce probate involvement. The appropriate structure should be based on what you need the plan to accomplish.
Not necessarily. A will provides instructions for property governed by the will, but that property may still require probate administration. Other assets may transfer outside probate through trusts, joint ownership, beneficiary designations or other arrangements.
When someone dies without a valid will, Colorado intestacy law determines who inherits property subject to intestate succession. The result depends on the person’s surviving family and the assets involved and may not reflect what the person would have chosen.
A will provides instructions to the court that become operative at death and can nominate a personal representative and guardians for minor children. A trust can hold and manage assets and provide instructions for their management and distribution. Whether a will-based or trust-based plan is appropriate depends on your circumstances and goals.
Yes! Young adults can benefit from documents authorizing trusted people to make financial or healthcare decisions if they become incapacitated. Marriage, children, home ownership, business ownership and accumulating assets create additional reasons to plan.
Reviewing an estate plan after significant changes involving your family, finances, property, business, health or fiduciaries helps ensure that the plan continues to reflect your wishes. Ben’s current guidance also recommends periodic review even when no obvious major life event has occurred.
Retirement accounts and life insurance commonly transfer according to beneficiary designations. Because those designations can operate independently from a will, they should be coordinated with the rest of your estate plan.
Trust planning can provide greater control over how and when beneficiaries receive assets. Depending on the circumstances, a trust can hold and manage property rather than requiring an entire inheritance to pass directly to a beneficiary at once.