"There are attorneys who will do a will or a trust for someone even though they do divorces or real estate or medical malpractice 98% of the time," he says. "They figure they can get a form someplace."

So what leads to bad estate plans and trusts most often? Is it flawed language, lawyer inexperience, or is it really just the inability for anybody to see five steps ahead in life?

"I think it's both," says Altman. "I think there's a lot of flawed language out there." He mentions one family he's been working with where the father and mother died in an accident. "The income from the trusts that were going to be created after both parents died 'had to, must, shall' pay the income to the beneficiaries, even though they're under 18.

"You're talking about paying $100,000 to $200,000 in income to a 17-year-old. No estate planner who really does estate planning should ever say that the income shall be paid to a 16-year-old. That doesn't make any sense. Would you want your infant when he turns 18 to get an income stream of $150,000 every year at 18? Would you want your infant to receive $2 million when he turns 23?"

"When I asked the attorney who drafted the documents 'Why did you do this?' his response was, 'I didn't think [the parents] would die young.' That indicates to me that there was no thought given to what was being done because he wasn't anticipating anything."

Joseph Alfonso, a CFP licensee at Aegis Financial Advisory LLC in Santa Clara, Calif., and Portland, Ore., recently worked with a couple to redraft the wife's separate trust, created with her inherited assets before she had married her husband. The wife's mother was the successor trustee, and the trust hadn't been changed after the marriage. So under the terms of the trust, if the wife had died, all the assets of the trust would have gone to her mother.

"It effectively disowned her spouse and two children because it had not been amended properly," he says. "Since the trust held most of their combined assets, the effect of her premature death under these circumstances would have been major."

What the woman should have done is amended or terminated her trust and instead commingled properties with her husband. Luckily, the disaster was averted.

Part of the problem, Alfonso says, is that when people's lives change, they often don't go back and review old trust documents to make sure the documents are current, their priorities the same.

Jeanni Harrison, a CFP licensee in San Diego, had a client in his late 60s, a father, who died with three adult children. He named his eldest daughter as successor trustee of his trust, not his ex-wife, the children's mother, even though she had recently moved back in with him. Two other siblings and the wife realized that the daughter had control of the assets and went nuts, Harrison says. The daughter wanted to follow the trust to the letter (she wasn't given, and wouldn't take, compensation). This came to a head when her mother found out $10,000 was earmarked to go to somebody in Europe, from which the couple had emigrated years before. A female.