Patricia De Fonte remembers watching the news unfold on Instagram of a drag queen who had been estranged from biological family, but passed away with no estate plan.
“Everything is chaos,” De Fonte recalled. “Because the family members want all the assets but don’t want to pay for a funeral, don’t want to participate in any way.”
In the end, friends of the drag queen had to raise funerary funds for the departed through GoFundMe, said De Fonte, an estate planning attorney who is the founder of De Fonte Law PC in San Francisco. De Fonte, who has queer family members, is an ally of the community and works with many clients who identify as LGBTQ+.
This sad and rather public drama could have been easily side-stepped with an estate plan that anticipated such problems, De Fonte said.
Case in point: a drag queen client of hers who did have an estate plan was “very clear as to who gets what and which family members were in and which were out, and which friends would receive, and which nonprofits.”
The result? “Two very different outcomes for two people who died within a short amount of time from each other, both rocking the same community,” De Fonte said.
Many clients, even the very wealthy, struggle with estate planning, but the risks for those identifying with the LGBTQ+ community are much higher — making it paramount that financial advisors prioritize this process in their relationships with those clients. Otherwise, a variety of unique problems await them if they or their partners die or become incapacitated.
Read more: LGBTQ employees are heading for a ‘retirement crisis’
Financial Planning spoke with several financial advisors and estate planning experts on how to better serve the LGBTQ+ community in this area, both during Pride Month and beyond. Below are five challenges they shared, and tips to handle them.