To finish Estate Planning Awareness Week, Forbes has linked an oft repeated story of celebrity estate planning mistakes of varying degrees. There are some lessons to be gleaned, but I take exception to the Chief Justice Burger inclusion. Every version of this link I have seen repeats ad nauseam that he made a mistake by drafting his own will and not creating a trust. What no one explains is that the Chief Justice drafted his will after his wife had died. Once she was gone, a trust would not have provided any estate tax benefits. Just as one should not rely on the "fact checkers" during this election season, one should not trust writers who endlessly cycle the same point of view on a story without objectively thinking about it. They might be as credible as Candy Crawley.
