There is a particular green binder in thousands of Colorado closets: the estate plan, signed a decade ago, filed away with relief and never opened again. The house has doubled in value since. A child divorced, a grandchild arrived — and the binder knows none of it.
Estate plans do not expire, but they drift. Documents drafted under old tax assumptions can misfire under new ones, and the 2026 federal exemption changes make this the moment to reread anything signed earlier.
Whiteford's Colorado team performs plan reviews as a defined engagement — a fresh read, a funding audit, and a short list of fixes. This page explains what we look for.
Why pre-2026 plans need rereading
Many older wills and trusts divide assets using formulas tied to the federal estate tax exemption in effect at death — clever drafting in its day. But when the exemption shifts, as with the 2026 federal changes, those formulas can silently reroute assets: overfunding one trust, starving another, or steering property away from a surviving spouse. The words on the page have not changed; what they do has.
Beyond formulas, older plans often assume a family that no longer exists — a former spouse as agent, a guardian for children now grown, a trustee who has died — and miss newer Colorado tools, from beneficiary deeds to crypto. A review reads the documents against today, not the year they were signed.
The funding audit: does the plan actually hold your assets?
The most common defect we find is not in the drafting. Families create a trust, sign beautifully, and never retitle anything into it — the house, the accounts, the business interests still sit in individual names. An unfunded trust is a set of instructions for an empty box, and the estate lands in the probate the trust was built to avoid.
The audit walks asset by asset: is the deed in the trust, are account titles right, do beneficiary designations point where the plan intends, did later acquisitions ever make it in? It is unglamorous work with an outsized payoff, because funding failures stay invisible until the worst possible moment.
- Deeds checked against trust ownership, including property in other states
- Beneficiary designations pulled from each institution and matched to the plan
- Fiduciary lineup confirmed: personal representative, trustees, agents, guardians
- Formula clauses stress-tested against the 2026 federal exemption changes
- Newer assets — businesses, crypto, recent real estate — brought inside the plan
What the review appointment looks like
Start with the free Colorado Estate Snapshot at /estate-snapshot — it organizes your documents, assets, and titling and flags obvious gaps. Then, in a free Legacy Game Plan Session, we read your documents and walk you through what still works, what has drifted, and what the 2026 changes mean for you.
Most reviews end in one of three places: reassurance that the plan holds, a modest amendment-and-retitling project, or a restatement for plans built under truly different assumptions. The attorney will tailor the recommendation — and tell you plainly if you need nothing.
