The Personal Property List and Your Estate Plan

Great! You’ve signed your will, your powers of attorney, and your trust. You have retitled your real estate to the trust (or perhaps to a beneficiary deed). Did you complete your personal property list yet? In this Elder Law Issues podcast episode, we talk about the usefulness of a list of items of tangible property — and recipients for each listed item — in your Arizona estate plan. As always, we limit our discussion to Arizona law, though we do know that other states may have similar provisions. What is the list? Is it a mandatory list that you must complete showing all of your personal property? No. Is it required for your will and trust to be effective? No. But it is a great help to your family, heirs and beneficiaries. We have written and talked about the value of these lists of personal items before. In this podcast episode, we go into a little more depth about how such a list can be used to augment your estate plan. Remember that you can only include tangible personal items (not real estate, not cash, not bank accounts). Also, you can update, add to, discard or change your list whenever you want. We explain how that works, and how you might use the list.