I was recently reviewing a living trust estate plan for an individual. The plan had been outdated for quite some time. As I was reviewing this individual’s plan, I noticed that most of the plan was from the 1990s. But the pages were not all the same color or format, which indicated that pages had been substituted for older pages. The kicker of this story is that the “newer” pages were from the early 2000s, more than 15 years old! The individual asked me if I could just do an “amendment” over the previous plan.
I am glad I caught this situation before it got out of hand. Altering an estate plan document such as a will or trust can have unintentional consequences that you may not foresee. For example, replacing pages of a will with new pages that contain new language without doing a formal amendment called a Codicil could lead to a court declaring that your will is invalid. If original pages are missing, your entire will or trust could be revoked.
You should be aware that if you do an amendment to a trust, or Codicil to a Will the original document must be preserved so the Amendment/Codicil can be read with the original. This will prevent litigation that would question the validity of your estate planning documents. Switching pages in an original document could also lead to costly battles that could invalidate a will or trust on charges of undue influence or forgery, among other charges.
The safest and most prudent way to modify a will or trust is to formally have an amendment/codicil written, executed, and kept with the original document. When you have extensive changes, a new will or a restatement to a trust should be created and executed, making clear that you intend to create a new, revised estate planning document that supersedes the older one.
