An estate plan is a photograph. The day you sign, it is a sharp and accurate picture of your family, your property, and your wishes. Then the family keeps moving and the photograph stays still. Three years later the picture and the people have drifted apart, and nobody has looked at the photograph since it went in the binder.
That is not a failure of the attorney or the client. It is just what happens to a document that describes a living family. This article walks through what changes, why it goes unnoticed, and what a short review once a year actually does about it.
What changes in three years
Start with the people. A plan names a trustee, a successor trustee, agents under a power of attorney, health care agents, an executor, sometimes a guardian. Those are real people with their own lives. In three years one of them has moved across the country, one has had a health scare, one has fallen out with the family, and one has quietly become the obvious choice but is not in the document at all. The plan still lists the names from signing day.
Then the family itself. Grandchildren are born. A child marries, or divorces. Someone named in the plan dies. A parent moves in. Each of these can change who should receive what, who should decide what, and how a trust should split.
Then the property. This is the one that catches the most people. A living trust only controls what is actually titled to it or paid to it by a beneficiary designation. In three years a couple opens a new brokerage account in their own names, refinances the house and lets the lender retitle it out of the trust, buys a car, starts a small business, inherits an IRA, or rolls over a 401(k) into a new account with the wrong beneficiary on file. None of that is in the trust unless somebody put it there. The plan is fine on paper and half empty in practice. Attorneys call this a funding problem, and it is the single most common reason a careful plan does not work.
Then the address. Moving from one state to another can change whether the state taxes the estate, whether there is an inheritance tax, whether property acquired during the marriage is community property, whether a transfer on death deed exists, and how much a small estate can skip probate. The documents are usually still valid, but the strategy behind them may no longer fit.
Then the law. The federal estate tax exemption changed again in 2025. Several states adjust their thresholds every January. Washington rewrote its estate tax in 2025. Maryland adopted a transfer on death deed in 2026. A plan built around one set of numbers can be built around the wrong numbers two years later.
Why nobody notices
Because nothing breaks. A stale plan does not send an error message. The documents sit in a binder or a vault and look exactly as official as the day they were signed. The family is busy. The attorney has hundreds of other households and no reliable way to know which ones have changed. The only moment anyone opens the plan is the moment it is needed, which is the one moment it cannot be fixed.
There is also a quieter reason. Reviewing a plan feels like a big project. People imagine a two hour meeting, a stack of paper, and a bill. So they put it off. The plan that would take twenty minutes to check becomes the plan that is never checked.
What a yearly review actually catches
A good review does not redo the plan. It asks a short list of questions and lets the attorney decide what deserves a conversation. In Legacy Guard that list is six parts and takes about 25 minutes:
- Your information. Has anything changed this year: a birth, a death, a marriage or divorce, a move, a new business, a major asset bought or sold? A yes does not change anything. It tells the firm where to look.
- Your objectives. For each goal the plan was built for, is it still important, and does the plan still meet it?
- The structure of your plan. The trust, the diagram, the attorney's walkthrough. Are you still satisfied with how it is built?
- The people in it. Each role, who is named, in order, and what the job involves. Are you still comfortable with each one?
- Funding. Every asset on file: still correct, something changed, or not sure. Add anything new. Never an account number.
- Your non-financial wealth. The stories, traditions, and values that are not in any document, and whether you want help capturing them.
Each answer that deserves attention becomes a flag the firm sees. A move to Texas carries a plain summary of what Texas does differently. A new account becomes a funding task. A trustee who can no longer serve becomes a reason to call. The firm reads the answers side by side, both spouses' at once, with the differences highlighted, and the conversation list writes itself.
Why once a year is the right rhythm
More often than once a year and people stop doing it. Less often and three years of drift go unnoticed. A year is long enough for life to happen and short enough that the fix is small. It also lines up with the things that already change yearly: tax thresholds, birthdays that matter (59 and a half, 65, 73), and the renewal of the firm's own engagement.
The other reason is habit. A review that arrives on the same month every year, with a reminder 30 days before and 7 days before, under your own attorney's name, becomes a thing the family expects. The first one takes 25 minutes. The fifth one takes fifteen, because most of the answers are still the same, and that is the point.
What it looks like when it works
A couple signs a trust in March. The following March they get an email from their attorney's office: time for your annual review. They sit on the sofa with a tablet, answer the six parts, and flag two things: a new brokerage account and a daughter who moved to Oregon. The firm sees both the next morning. A paralegal calls about the account and gets it retitled. The attorney makes a note that Oregon has a $1 million estate tax threshold, in case the daughter is ever a trustee holding property there. Total time for the family: 25 minutes. Total time for the firm: a phone call. The photograph is sharp again for another year.
That is all an annual review is. It is not a new plan. It is the habit of looking at the old one before it matters.
Where to start
If your plan is more than a year old and you have not looked at it, open the binder and check three things: the names in each role, the title on your largest accounts and your house, and the state printed on the first page. If any of those is wrong, call your attorney. If your attorney uses Legacy Guard, your review will arrive on its own; if not, ask them to look at it. Firms pay nothing to join, and the review is free for every family.