Estate Plan Checklist for Business Owners: The Six Parts the Standard List Leaves Out

The standard estate plan checklist is written for someone whose assets are a house, some accounts and a retirement plan. If you own a business, or three, most of your net worth is not on that list, and the part that is missing is the part that causes the most damage when something happens to you: who runs the company on Monday, who can sign the checks, who owns your share and at what price, and what happens to the loan you made from one company to another.

This is the checklist for owners. It covers the documents every plan needs, the ones that only business owners need, what to check inside each company, how to fund the trust with your business interests, and the maintenance that keeps the plan matching the business as it changes.

Part 1: the core documents (everyone)

1. Revocable living trust, so the business interests and the property pass without probate, and a successor trustee who can act immediately.
2. Pour-over will that sends anything left outside the trust into it, and names guardians for minor children.
3. Durable financial power of attorney, with explicit authority over business interests: voting, signing, borrowing, selling. A generic form often does not include these.
4. Health care directive and medical power of attorney.
5. Beneficiary designations on retirement accounts and life insurance, checked against the trust so they do not contradict it.
6. A letter of instruction listing every account, entity, advisor, password manager and key person, so the successor can find things.

Part 2: the business documents (owners only)

1. Operating agreement for every LLC, current. It decides what happens to your interest at death or incapacity, whether it can pass to a trust, and who manages in your absence. An LLC with no operating agreement, or one from the formation kit, defaults to state law, which rarely says what you would want.
2. Buy-sell agreement for any company with other owners: who buys, at what price or formula, funded how (often life insurance). Without it, your family inherits a minority interest nobody wants to buy at a price nobody agrees on.
3. Succession or continuity plan naming who runs each business, who has bank signing authority, and how payroll gets made in the first month.
4. Key person and buy-sell insurance sized to the formula in the agreement, owned by the right party.
5. Valuation method written down for each company, so the estate, the buy-sell and the tax return use the same approach.
6. Assignments of membership interest to the trust, with member consents (see Part 4).

Part 3: inside each company

The documents above are only as good as what they point at. For each entity, check:

• The books are current and closed monthly, so the company can be valued and run by someone who is not you.
• Bank signing authority includes a second person or the successor trustee, or the accounts freeze.
• The entity's own records (state filings, EIN letter, operating agreement, membership schedule, annual report filings) are in one place.
• Loans and leases have been checked for clauses triggered by a change in ownership or by the owner's death.
• The S-Corp election, if there is one, has a plan for which trust holds the shares after death and which election (QSST or ESBT) will be made, because the wrong trust terminates the S status.

Part 4: funding the trust with your business interests

An unfunded trust is a document. For each LLC you own personally: read the operating agreement for transfer restrictions; get written consent from any other members; sign an assignment of your membership interest to the trustee; update the membership schedule and the company's equity accounts to show the trust as the member; and check with any lender whose loan documents treat the change as a transfer. For an S-Corp, confirm the trust is an eligible shareholder now and plan the post-death election. Our guide for attorneys on estate planning with multiple LLCs walks through the funding steps in detail.

Part 5: the money between your companies

Owners of several entities almost always have money moving between them: a loan from the holding company to an operating LLC, a note from you personally to a business, rent from one company to another, reimbursements outstanding. Each of these is an asset of one party and a liability of another, and each has a balance on the day you die. If the loan has no note and the payments were booked as transfers, the estate inherits a claim it cannot prove for an amount it cannot state.

For the checklist: every loan between your companies, or between you and a company, has a signed promissory note with interest at least at the applicable federal rate; every payment is recorded as principal and interest on both sides; both sides show the same balance at every close; and the notes are listed in the letter of instruction. Our guide to loans between your own LLCs has the entries.

Part 6: keeping the plan current

The plan matches the business on the day it is signed and starts to drift immediately. The events that break it are ordinary: a new LLC, a new bank account opened in your name instead of the trust's, a refinance that re-titles a property, a company sold, a new loan between siblings, a partner bought out. None of them are estate events in anyone's mind, and none come back to the attorney on their own.

The maintenance is a trigger, not a date: whenever an entity, an account, an ownership percentage or a loan changes, the map changes and the plan should be checked against it. That requires a current map of what you own, drawn from the books rather than from memory. HaraPro keeps every entity, account and intercompany loan in one place and draws the ownership map from them, so a new LLC that was never assigned, an account still in your name, or a loan whose two sides stopped matching shows up as a change while you can still fix it. The estate planning page shows the map and the documents it tracks; one business is free forever.

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