Estate Plan Maintenance
An estate plan signed once and never revisited is a plan built for a version of your life that will eventually stop existing. The TLC™ Estate Plan Maintenance & Fee Guarantee Program is our answer to that reality: a structured membership that keeps your plan current as your family, your assets, and the law change around it — and locks in a guaranteed, dramatically reduced fee for administering your estate or trust when the time eventually comes.
The program rests on a simple observation, one we see confirmed constantly in our practice: the families who experience the smoothest, least expensive estate administrations are almost never the wealthiest families — they’re the families whose plans were kept current. The families who experience the most conflict, delay, and unnecessary cost are almost always the ones whose plan hadn’t been looked at in a decade, regardless of how carefully it was drafted originally.
PROGRAM ELIGIBILITY
TLC™ membership is available exclusively to clients for whom Frankel Estate Planning & Elder Law prepared the underlying will or trust. This isn’t an arbitrary restriction — it reflects what the program actually does. Our ability to catch a gap during an annual review, confirm a trust is still properly funded, or make a same-day amendment at a reduced rate all depend on our already having your documents, your funding records, and your family’s history on file. A plan we didn’t prepare is one we’d effectively need to re-draft from scratch before we could maintain it responsibly, which is a different engagement entirely.
If your estate plan was prepared by another attorney and you’d like the protection TLC™ provides, the path is straightforward: we prepare a new will or trust for you first. Many clients who come to us this way enroll in TLC™ the same day their new plan is signed.
MEMBERSHIP
in which we assess your plan against your current family situation, finances, health, and goals — rather than waiting for you to notice something has changed.
When federal or Pennsylvania law shifts in a way that affects clients generally — a change to estate tax exemptions, Medicaid rules, or similar developments — we update your documents at no additional charge, rather than waiting for you to ask.
Reasonable phone calls and questions from you, your family, or your financial advisors are included, without hourly billing for every conversation.
Updating an address, a successor fiduciary's name, or correcting a minor error is included in your annual fee.
More significant changes — adding a beneficiary, restructuring a distribution — are billed at 50% off our standard hourly rate rather than full hourly billing.
for trust-based plans, confirming the trust remains properly funded and functioning as intended.
of just 1% of your gross estate (subject to our current $4,500 minimum), locked in for as long as you remain continuously enrolled — typically a fraction of the 3% to 5% families commonly pay elsewhere.
in which we walk your family or agents through the plan you built and the concrete steps ahead, rather than leaving them to interpret documents alone during an already difficult time.
FEE GUARANTEE
BEFORE AND AFTER
PROGRAM STATED
$595 for will-based plans; $795 for trust-based plans, billed annually beginning the January after your plan is executed
your rate never increases for as long as you remain continuously enrolled
though we believe strongly in its value for nearly every client
by written notice; there are no refunds for a partial year, reflecting that the program's benefits are available in full from the moment of enrollment
is available by contacting our office, generally by January 31 of the year you wish to resume — we do not solicit lapsed members to rejoin, out of respect for your decision
ENROLL INFO
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