An estate plan is not a one-time task. The documents you sign today reflect your family, your assets, and the law as they exist right now. When any of those things change, your plan may no longer do what you intended — and in some cases, it may do the opposite.

Probate can be avoided in Utah, and for most families it should be. The probate process ties up your estate in court for months, creates a public record of your assets, and costs money that could otherwise pass to your heirs. Utah law provides several tools for keeping assets out of probate entirely, and each one works differently depending on what you own and who you want to receive it.

If you die without a will in Utah, the state decides who inherits your property. Utah’s intestate succession laws, found in Utah Code § 75-2-101 through § 75-2-114, set out a fixed distribution scheme based on your family relationships at death. Those rules apply whether or not they match what you actually wanted.

Blended families are one of the most common — and most legally complicated — situations in estate planning. When you remarry, you bring together two sets of children, two financial histories, and sometimes two very different sets of expectations about who gets what. Without a carefully designed plan, the law will make those decisions for you, and the results rarely match what anyone actually wanted.

You survived the pregnancy, the hospital, and the first few sleepless weeks. Estate planning is probably the last thing on your mind right now. But having a child is the single most common reason people finally get a will and trust in place — and for good reason. Without a plan, a court decides who raises your child if something happens to both parents. Your assets could pass to an 18-year-old with no restrictions. And your family could spend months in probate court before anyone can access a dime.

If you already have a will, you have done more than most people. But for the majority of Utah families, a will alone leaves some significant gaps — gaps that a revocable living trust is specifically designed to fill. Whether you need a trust on top of your will depends on what you own, who your beneficiaries are, and how much you want to simplify things for your family when the time comes.

If you've been putting off estate planning because you're not sure what it costs — or because you've heard horror stories about runaway hourly billing — this guide is for you. We'll break down exactly what drives the cost of an estate plan in Utah, what you should expect to pay, and why the cheapest option is rarely the best one.

A Deferred Sales Trust is a tax deferral strategy that allows an owner of highly appreciated property to sell that property, defer the resulting capital gains tax, and receive the sale proceeds over time as structured installment payments. Instead of paying a large capital gains tax bill in the year of sale, the seller recognizes gain gradually as payments are received, spreading the tax liability across years or decades.