Course 3.1 · 50 minutes
Estate Planning Basics: Wills, Trusts, Powers of Attorney, and What Happens If You Do Nothing
Understand every document in a complete estate plan, what each one does, and what happens to your family and money if you have none.
- Who it is for
- Every adult, especially parents of minor children.
- Runtime
- 50 minutes
Pre-order: this course is still in development. Your purchase includes its materials as they are published in your portal. No release date is confirmed. Buy 5 or more and every course is 30% off.
After payment is confirmed and your access is set up, the files listed below can be downloaded from your portal. Any unpublished materials will be added when ready, at no additional charge.
Files currently available
- Document Inventory Gap Analysis.
- Asset Titling Beneficiary Map.
- Guardian Selection Worksheet.
- Attorney Preparation Checklist.
- Letter of Instruction Template.
- Slide deck.
- Visual: Roadmap.
- Visual: Three Estates.
- Visual: Intestacy Flowchart.
- Visual: Probate Flowchart.
- Visual: Core Documents.
- Visual: Guardian Two Jobs.
- Visual: Four Lanes.
- Visual: Reed No Plan.
- Visual: Reed With Plan.
- Visual: Comparison.
- Visual: Update Triggers.
- Visual: Joint Account Trap.
- Visual: Decision Tree.
- Workbook.
- The narrated lesson. 50 minutes, cued to the deck, with chapter markers by lesson. Added to your portal when published, at no extra cost. This purchase does not guarantee that the narrated lesson is available today.
What the course covers
- 01What your estate is, and what dying without a plan does to it7 min
- 02Probate: what it is, what it costs, and how long it takes6 min
- 03The core documents: will, revocable trust, powers of attorney, health care directives, and the guardian nomination11 min
- 04Titling and beneficiary designations override the will6 min
- 05Worked example: a young family with a house, a 401(k), life insurance, and two children7 min
- 06Tricks of the trade: the letter of instruction, the funding checklist, and the update triggers5 min
- 07Mistakes and traps: online forms, joint accounts with a child, and outdated beneficiaries5 min
- 08Action plan and recap3 min
How it fits: Entry course for the tranche. Pairs with 2.1 and 7.1.
The standard every course holds
- A narrated lesson of 45 to 60 minutes, produced as audio
- A designed slide deck you download and keep
- A computational workbook that runs the actual legal tests
- A toolkit of checklists and protocols
- A legal authority appendix carrying the two-pass vetting protocol
Written for a diligent reader with no legal education. Professionally narrated using a studio voice model of Brian T. Boyd. The course is recorded instruction, not a live consultation.
Where this course sits
Track 3: Estate Planning
This course is one step in a track built around a single outcome. See the full build order and the other courses that get you there.
Back to this trackEducational material from the private client curriculum of Brian T. Boyd. This is legal education for a general audience, not legal advice, and no attorney-client relationship is created by purchasing, viewing, or using it. Tax outcomes depend on your facts and your state.