An estate plan is only as good as the last time it was reviewed.

Why Your Estate Plan Needs Regular Review

Creating an estate plan is one of the most important legal decisions you will make. But the work does not end at the signing table. Life changes, families grow, financial situations evolve, and tax laws are revised. An estate plan that was perfectly suited to your circumstances three years ago may no longer reflect your wishes, protect your family, or take advantage of current planning opportunities.

Life Changes That Trigger a Review

Certain life events should prompt an immediate estate plan review, even if your annual review is not yet due:

• Marriage or remarriage: Your new spouse may not automatically receive what you intend under your existing plan, particularly if you have children from a prior relationship
• Divorce: New Jersey law automatically revokes certain designations to a former spouse under N.J.S.A. 3B:3-141, but not all. Retirement accounts governed by federal ERISA law (29 U.S.C. § 1144(a)2) require manual beneficiary changes, as the Supreme Court confirmed in Egelhoff v. Egelhoff, 532 U.S. 141 (2001)3
• Birth or adoption of a child or grandchild: New family members need to be included in your will, trust, and guardian designations
• Death of a beneficiary, executor, or trustee: If someone named in your plan has passed away, you need to designate a replacement
• Significant financial change: A major inheritance, sale of a business, new real estate purchase, or significant increase or decrease in net worth can all change the appropriate estate planning strategy
• Relocation: If you or a named fiduciary moves to another state, your plan should be reviewed for compliance with both states' laws
• Health changes: A diagnosis of a serious illness may necessitate long-term care provisions, special needs trust planning, or Medicaid strategies
• Change in relationship with a fiduciary: If you no longer trust the person you named as executor, trustee, power of attorney agent, or guardian, a change is essential

Tax Law Changes That Affect Your Plan

Tax law is the part of an estate plan most likely to shift underneath it, because the rules can change without you doing anything at all, and a provision that was sound under the old exemption can become unnecessary, or actively counterproductive, under the new one. The last several years offer pointed examples:

• OBBBA, $15M 2026 basic exclusion amount: IRS Revenue Procedure 2025-32 explains that OBBBA amendedIRC § 20101 to set the federal estate and gift tax basic exclusion amount at $15 million per individual for 2026 ($30 million for married couples using portability), indexed after 2026. This eliminated the TCJA sunset that would have reverted the exemption to approximately $7 million. Plans designed around the anticipated sunset (such as aggressive gifting strategies, credit shelter trusts funded at a lower amount, or provisions triggered by exemption reduction) should be reviewed promptly
• SECURE Act changes to inherited IRAs: The SECURE Act rewrote the required-distribution rules underIRC § 401(a)(9)2, ending the "stretch IRA" for most non-spouse beneficiaries and instead requiring inherited retirement accounts to be fully distributed within ten years. This matters because a trust drafted as a retirement-account beneficiary under the old life-expectancy rules can, under the new timeline, force a decade of accelerated taxable distributions into a trust taxed at the highest brackets, the opposite of what the plan intended. A trust named as IRA or 401(k) beneficiary should be re-read against the current rules to confirm it still distributes the way you want
• NJ estate tax elimination (2018): New Jersey eliminated its state estate tax effective January 1, 2018. Plans that included specific provisions to minimize NJ estate tax, such as credit shelter trusts funded at the former NJ exemption amount, may now be unnecessarily complex or counterproductive
• NJ inheritance tax: Unlike the estate tax, New Jersey's inheritance tax (N.J.S.A. 54:34-13 et seq.) remains in effect. Tax rates and class exemptions should be reviewed against your current beneficiary structure, particularly if you have added non-exempt beneficiaries (siblings, friends, unmarried partners) since your plan was created

What Our Annual Review Includes

When you participate in Simon Law Group's annual review service, we conduct a thorough examination of your entire estate plan:

• Review of your will, trust, powers of attorney, and healthcare directive for accuracy and current effectiveness
• Verification that all beneficiary designations on retirement accounts, life insurance, and financial accounts are current and consistent with your plan
• Confirmation that your trust is properly funded and that any newly acquired assets have been titled correctly
• Assessment of whether changes in federal or NJ tax law create planning opportunities or risks
• Discussion of any life changes that have occurred since your last review
• Recommendations for amendments or additional documents, with clear fee quotes for any required work

The thread running through every one of these steps is the same: a signed document is a snapshot of your intent on the day you signed it, and the review confirms that snapshot still matches your life. Two checks tend to matter most. The first is trust funding: a revocable living trust under the New Jersey Uniform Trust Code, N.J.S.A. 3B:31-11 et seq., only avoids probate for the assets actually retitled into it, so a house bought or an account opened since the last review can quietly fall outside the plan unless it is funded in. The second is the chain of beneficiary designations and fiduciary appointments, which live outside the will entirely and answer to no one but the form on file. Catching a gap in either while you are alive and able to fix it is the entire value of the review.

The Cost of Not Reviewing

The consequences of an outdated estate plan range from inconvenient to catastrophic. Common problems that arise from plans that have not been reviewed include:

• An ex-spouse may receive your life insurance or retirement assets if you do not update your beneficiary forms. Under federal ERISA law, the beneficiary named on the account form generally overrides any instructions in your will. As a result, you'll need to update these designations directly with the account custodian.
• A named guardian who is no longer willing or able to care for your children
• Assets passing through probate because trust funding was never completed for newly acquired property
• Tax provisions that are no longer beneficial or that create unintended complications under the 2026 $15M federal basic exclusion amount
• A power of attorney agent who has become estranged, incapacitated, or deceased
• An advance directive that does not reflect your current healthcare preferences

Test the signed plan against the family and assets that exist now

An annual review should answer concrete questions: do the fiduciaries and beneficiaries remain right, are newly acquired assets titled consistently with the plan, has a trust actually been funded, and do current tax and family circumstances change the drafting choice? Bring the complete signed plan, current beneficiary designations, deeds, a current asset and account list, and notes about births, deaths, marriages, divorces, moves, health changes, or business changes since the last review. Counsel can then separate necessary amendments and funding corrections from documents that still work as written. Call (800) 709-1131 or use the intake form to request the review.