How Estate Planning Can Reduce The High Cost of Dying- Part 2
Despite the fact that it happens to every single one of us and is as every bit as natural as birth, very few among us are properly prepared for death—whether our own death or the death of a loved one.
Yet the pandemic might be changing this.
According to Census figures, the pandemic caused the U.S. death rate to spike by nearly 20% between 2019 and 2020, the largest increase in American mortality in 100 years. More than two years and 1 million deaths later, it's more clear than ever that death is not only ever-present, but a central and inevitable part of all our lives.
Yet, some in the end-of-life industry believe the pandemic’s massive loss of life has also created an opportunity to transform the way we face death, grief, and all of the other issues that arise when we lose someone we love dearly. In fact, this sentiment is the mission of the new startup Empathy, an AI-based platform designed to help families navigate the logistical and emotional challenges following the death of a loved one.
“For far too many, COVID-19 has been a terrible reminder that death and loss are all around us,” notes Empathy CEO and co-founder Ron Gura in a recent company report. “But it also represents an opportunity to shift public perception, to bring a topic that has been for far too long shrouded in darkness into the light of day, where we can fully examine it and figure out how best to help those who have to shoulder its burdens.”
As anyone who has dealt with loss knows, when a loved one dies, those left behind face major challenges, not only emotional and logistical, but financial as well. Empathy was designed to help manage and streamline these responsibilities for grieving families. In addition to the app, in March 2022 Empathy released its first-ever Cost of Dying Report, which surveyed more than 2,000 Americans—each of whom had lost a loved one in the last five years—to get a clearer picture of dying’s true cost to families.
Last week, in part one of this series, we discussed some of the Cost Of Dying’s most notable findings and explained how proactive estate planning can dramatically reduce many of the financial, logistical, and emotional challenges for your loved ones following your death. Here in part two, we wrap up our summary of the report and outline more of the ways proactive planning can relieve the burden of your death for your family.
THE COST IN LOST TIME
On average, the report found that families spent 420 hours over 13 months completing all the tasks needed to settle a loved one’s estate after death. However, the time commitment shot up to 20 months for estates that required the court process of probate. Additionally, most respondents underestimated how long these tasks would take: 54% said it took longer than they expected, while 31% said it took much longer.
To give you some idea of what consumed families’ time most during these months, the report breaks down the responsibilities that respondents reported taking the longest as follows:
Most Time-Consuming Tasks
The funeral: 55%
Financial matters: 47%
The will and probate: 45%
Paying bills, debts, and taxes: 41%
Dealing with the house or other property: 25%
Finding service providers: 23%
Reducing The Time Burden For Your Family
With proper estate planning, you dramatically reduce the time your surviving loved ones will have to spend on many of these tasks. For example, by preplanning and prepaying your own funeral, you can greatly reduce what most families reported as the most time-consuming task. For other tasks, such as dealing with probate and paying off estates with debt, you can use estate planning to totally eliminate the need for your family to deal with these issues. As we noted last week, you can save your family both the time and expense of probate by creating a revocable living trust. One other unnecessary task we see families spending a lot of time on is simply locating all of a loved one’s assets when they die.
This happens when you become incapacitated or die, and your family is unable to find—or simply overlooks—all of your wealth and property. This occurs because most people fail to properly inventory their assets or keep that inventory regularly updated throughout their lifetime. Indeed, this is why there’s currently more than $58 billion of lost and unclaimed assets held by state and federal agencies in the U.S.