Thirteen Celebrity Estate Planning Lessons

Celebrities often do a great job accumulating wealth during their lives only to allow it all to slip away after their deaths with improper (or none at all) estate planning.

Though there’s an undeniable element of schadenfreude that makes these disaster stories ghoulishly enjoyable, there are also important lessons to be learned. The problems experienced by celebrity estates are often the very same ones that trip up more typical clients, simply writ larger.

Because many of these concepts and dangers can be difficult to even broach with clients, being able to utilize some of the more “bombastic” examples provided by celebrities can help break the ice and better get the potential dangers across to clients who might otherwise zone out once the “boring” topic of estate planning comes up. Some chocolate to help the pill go down so to speak.

Here are 13 valuable lessons practitioners can learn from celebrity estate planning mishaps: