Secure Estate Plan Access

Your estate plan is only as strong as your ability to find it on the worst day. Greg McIntyre sits down with law partner Brenton Begley to talk about a problem almost every family eventually faces: important legal documents that are perfectly drafted but impossible to locate when a hospital, bank, or courthouse asks for proof.

We break down our two track approach to document storage. First, we deliver a durable estate planning binder with protected originals, including wills, trusts, financial power of attorney, and healthcare power of attorney, so signatures and notarizations stay pristine for the long haul. Then we pair those originals with free eDocs access, a secure online portal where you control the username, password, and sharing. That means your chosen agent can pull up a power of attorney from a phone in a true emergency, and you can quickly provide a PDF to a bank, physician, or family member without scrambling.

We also dig into a question that creates real panic during probate: what happens if the original will is lost. With updated North Carolina law, a copy may still be usable when the drafting attorney can certify it and provide an affidavit confirming it is a true and accurate copy. Long term electronic document retention can become the safety net that keeps a family out of court fights and delays.

If you care about estate planning, elder law, probate readiness, and secure document storage, this conversation will help you build a plan that works in real life. Subscribe for more practical guidance, share this with someone organizing family paperwork, and leave a review with the one document you wish you had easier access to.

Transcript

Greg McIntyre 0:21

How McIntyre Elderlaw stores your electronic documents safely and securely. Brenton, how are you doing today?

Brenton Begley 0:31

I'm doing great.

The Estate Planning Binder System

Free EDocs Portal Explained

Greg McIntyre 0:33

I'm joined by my partner Brenton Begley today, and we want to talk about some of the cool technology that we have and how it really works well with the practical original documents that you have in your possession. Let's talk about that. Brenton, you know, when we do an estate plan, will trust package, we deliver that in this beautiful package. This beautiful binder, kind of like you see behind me here, where we really want this to be able to be stored, have a safety box, and really be there for you if you ever need it ever in the future. So the originals would be good. Even inside the binder that we have, the estate planning binder, we will encapsulate or enclose all the documents in a plastic sleeve individually so that those pages will be pristine when you need them for a power of attorney, healthcare power of attorney, will trust, whatever. But also, Brenton, there are times in this electronic day and age where I might need to share access with a bank, other attorney, um, family member, and we really help facilitate that for free for our clients for life. How do we do that?

Brenton Begley 1:47

Yeah, so in each one of our fee agreements, one of the things that we include is free edocs access, and that is access to an online server where we upload your documents that we do for you. We give you a username and password that has bank level security for you to be able to access that at any time. Now, anyone you share that with can also access it. And I remind people, you know, a power of attorney that we do, for example, you know, you may not have that in your back pocket in an emergency situation, but if you have free Edocs access, you will have access to it. Your power of attorney, the agent that you name, will have access to it from a phone, tablet, or computer. And it's very important to know that in that document, it explicitly says that an electronic copy of that document is just as good as the original. So in an emergency situation, they can literally pull up their phone, pull out the power of attorney, and show whoever's necessary to see that that they are in fact the power of attorney. So that in emergency situations is incredibly important, but also as a matter of convenience, if you need to share it with a bank, you need to share it with your physician, you need to share it with maybe some of your family members, they will have the ability to access it if you download it as a PDF from that platform and share that document.

Bank Level Security And Sharing

Greg McIntyre 3:08

Absolutely. And you're talking bank level um security encryption, where you're the only one that sets up the password as the client, and we don't even have that password. Okay. So, you know, we you know, this is something that has been great for our clients throughout for years, and gosh, it has a value. We've I've thought about charging money for it annually. I could. People pay for storage services like that, and we offer that for free, along with your original documents. Um, I'm very proud of the services we offer. Brenton, I think this is just another example of what our goal is the extra mile. It is the second mile, it is going above and beyond.

Certified Copies And Probate Safety Net

Brenton Begley 4:02

You know, and speaking of going above and beyond, another service that we do offer our clients is, you know, a lot of people don't understand that you have to have the original will. So, you know, if you sign a will, obviously we're gonna give you your original, but to probate it, you have to have the original until recently. Finally, the legislator got with the times, updated the law, and says it which says that you can use a copy of the will as long as there is some type of proof from the drafting attorney, um, having signed an affidavit, put that on file, um, indicating that the copy from the attorney's office that we're holding is in fact a true and accurate and certified copy. So being able to certify that from the drafting attorney. And that's something that we're gonna be able to do because, you know, not all attorneys keep a copy of the will forever. They're really bound to it being a six-year period. What we do is we tell our clients, hey, with this free Edox access, we're gonna keep it forever for you. And so we can certify those copies if you ever lose the original, and we provide that service as um, you know, for all of our clients that we do estate planning documents for.

Ask About The Service

Greg McIntyre 5:14

What a safety, what a safety net for the client that even if you lose the original, as long as you engage us to store the will as the original, we create that affidavit. There's the agreement that we're going to do that. We certify that it's true and accurate, meets the qualifications for a probatable will in North Carolina. Then we, as the attorneys, are allowed to store that and then produce that to your family and to the court for probate, even if you lose your originals. So ask about that service. That is a cool service. Brenton, I appreciate you. Thank you for doing the Elder Law report with me here today. And uh you guys have a good day out there. Okay. See you, Brenton.