The Documents Exist. The Question Is Whether They Agree.
Most people who have done some estate planning have a will. Some have a trust. Most have retirement accounts and life insurance policies with beneficiary designations filled out at some point in the past. A few have powers of attorney and healthcare directives on file somewhere.
What most do not have is someone who has looked at all of those pieces together and confirmed they point to the same place.
A will that says one thing and a beneficiary form that says another does not produce a conflict that gets resolved in court. The beneficiary form wins. The intent behind the will does not matter. The family expectation does not matter. The form controls, and by the time anyone realizes the problem it is too late to fix it.
Estate planning coordination is the process of making sure the documents, the account paperwork, and the tax picture all align with the same intent. Maris works with individuals and families across Seattle, Everett, and Snohomish County to close the gaps before they become the problem a family has to deal with after the fact.
Coordination Is Not Drafting. It Is Verifying.
Maris does not write wills or trusts. That is the attorney's work. What estate planning coordination does is review everything that exists, identify where the pieces conflict or where something is missing, and produce a clear action list organized by who needs to handle each item.
That means reviewing beneficiary designations on retirement accounts, IRAs, and life insurance policies to confirm they are current, intentional, and include contingent beneficiaries. It means checking that powers of attorney and healthcare directives name the right people and that the backup designations are in place if the primary cannot serve. It means verifying that assets are titled correctly so that a trust that exists on paper is actually funded, and that account ownership does not override the intent of the documents.
Each of those items seems administrative. Each of them has produced outcomes families did not expect and could not reverse.
A Beneficiary Form From Twenty Years Ago Is Still a Binding Document
Life changes. The beneficiary designations on a 401(k) opened at a first job, an IRA funded through a previous marriage, or a life insurance policy taken out before children were born do not update themselves. They sit in a file at a financial institution, legally binding, until someone reviews them and changes them intentionally.
The most common estate planning problems Maris sees are not complicated legal failures. They are outdated forms, unfunded trusts, and missing backup designations that no one caught because no one looked at everything together.
A beneficiary designation review confirms that the names, percentages, and contingent choices on every account reflect current intent. It is one of the highest-value steps in estate planning and one of the most consistently skipped.
The Tax Picture Has to Be Part of the Coordination
How assets pass to heirs affects what those heirs keep. Retirement accounts passing to certain beneficiaries carry distribution requirements that affect taxation. A trust structured one way produces different tax outcomes than the same trust structured differently. Business interests, concentrated positions, and real estate each carry their own considerations depending on how they are titled and how they are directed at death.
Estate planning coordination at the CPA level means the tax consequences of how the plan is structured are reviewed alongside the documents, not handed off to a tax advisor afterward. The plan that comes out of that review reflects not just what the client wants to happen but what it will actually cost when it does.
What the Process Looks Like
Maris approaches estate planning coordination as a structured review with a clear output.
It starts with understanding the legacy goals, the family situation, and any charitable intentions. From there the work collects and reviews what exists: wills, trusts, beneficiary statements, powers of attorney, healthcare directives, account titles, and ownership structures. The review identifies gaps, conflicts, and outdated choices across all of those documents and forms. The output is a short, functional action list organized by who needs to handle each item, whether that is the attorney, the financial institution, or the client directly.
The final step is confirming completion. A plan that stalls halfway through implementation is not a plan. Maris tracks what was updated and what still needs attention until the coordination is finished.
The Plan Should Function, Not Just Exist
An estate plan that has never been reviewed since it was drafted is not a plan in any practical sense. It is a set of documents that may or may not reflect current intent, current family circumstances, or current account ownership. The only way to know is to look.
Owners and families who go through estate planning coordination describe the same result. For the first time, they know that what they have built will actually work the way they intended, and that the people they want protected are protected by documents that agree with each other.
Maris & Associates CPAs provides estate planning coordination services to individuals, families, and business owners across Seattle, Everett, and Snohomish County. Contact us to talk through what the review process looks like for your specific situation.