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There are gifts, and THEN there are gifts. The biggest gift you’ll ever give, however, is the one you won’t see opened: your estate. And though you can’t put it under a tree, with proper planning, and a good estate planning attorney, you can ensure that it is wrapped up neatly and gets to your loved ones.

At your Thanksgiving table, there may be lively conversation about important issues like football, politics, and cornbread recipes. But it’s also a good time to take stock of the deeper issues in the background of your lives, like estate planning.

Part of the job of estate planning is thinking through the different ways the future might work out - who will survive whom, whether a beneficiary will be a minor or an adult at the time she receives the bequest. It’s important to take a range of possibilities into account.

When a close relative dies, and someone other than you has been named in the will as the executor of the estate (or applies to the court to administer the estate, if there was no will), you will receive a Waiver and Consent document and you’ll be asked to sign and return it.