Review, Revise and Strenghten.

It is imperative to keep your comprehensive estate plan with special needs provisions updated, especially related to asset distributions. Many folks fail at this important task because of the mistaken belief that the legal documents need to be amended or rewritten. No one relishes additional legal fees.
In reality, the majority of distributions at death do not pass according to the will but are distributed by the beneficiary declarations for your life insurance, IRA’s, 401K’s and annuities. The result is that you can fine tune your plan by adjusting the distribution %’s for your intended beneficiaries.
To affect this type of update, your financial consultant or estate planner should be asked to reassess the financial profile for your special needs child on a regular basis to accommodate any variances that have, or may, occur. This will then alter the present value figure for your death plan. With this new figure, you can use the simple Change of Beneficiary form to increase funding to the required areas (i.e. the Special Needs Trust).
Surprisingly, many plans are under funded by over 100% and micro-economic faults are the cause. Many financial plans:

-Understate actual living expenses
-Use static interest assumptions,
-Ignore the internal costs of money management,
-Fail to account for taxes, and
-Disregard cost of living increases.

Since today’s disabled population will live to ages closer to normal mortality expectations, many trusts are established with cash flow projections of fifty years or more. What happens if an improperly funded trust terminates in 20 years while the beneficiary still has 30 years more to live? In a word, disaster!