Estate planning does not need to be complicated. If you've ever talked to an attorney about it, you probably got lost by all the terms. Should you have a disclaimer trust, an AB trust or an ABC trust? Will a QTIP trust work or do you need a QDOT instead? Your life insurance policy should be transferred to an ILIT. Your estate tax exclusion needs to be coordinated with your GST exemption, but what is GST anyway?

These terms apply only if you are one of the 3 people in every 1,000 whose estates are large enough to trigger the estate tax. So unless your assets are valuable enough that you rank in the top 0.3% of all US taxpayers, you can forget about the alphabet soup most estate planners will throw at you.

For the rest of us, estate planning should be easy. Keep track of what assets you own, make arrangements for someone to manage your assets when you can't do it anymore, and then give that person instructions about what to do with the assets.

With a little bit of guidance, smart people can use their own judgment to design their estate plan. The Practical Plans process is meant to help you create estate plans that are going to work efficiently.