If you have not planned your estate yet, take inventory. Spend a half-hour and jot down the assets you own, major and minor. Who should own these assets after you die? Your spouse should do this, too – and you should talk about your preferences. It may not turn out to be the easiest conversation, but agreement now may preclude family squabbles and legal challenges down the line. (If you have a prenuptial agreement in place, you may have already discussed some of these matters.) You should also consider two scenarios – what happens if you die first, and what happens if your spouse dies before you do.

If you and/or your spouse have children from prior marriages, there may be some dilemmas for each of you. If you die, there is a real possibility that your current husband or wife will not elect to provide for your children from past marriages. So what might you do to prepare for that possibility? You might make a child the primary beneficiary of a life insurance policy, or set up a trust for your kid(s), or place certain real property under joint ownership with a child.

If you have already written a will, it will probably need revisions. They could be considerable. You want to be extremely specific about which heir gets what; you need to state bequests convincingly, because the more convincing your bequest, the less ambiguity.

How up-to-date are your beneficiary designations? Out-of-date beneficiary decisions are an Achilles heel of estate planning. Be sure to review them; you may want to revise beneficiary forms for retirement plans, investment accounts, and insurance policies.

As you consider these revisions, pay particular attention if you have been divorced. Divorce may actually preclude you from changing beneficiaries in certain cases. Turn to a lawyer and show the lawyer a copy of your divorcee decree; ask if revising your beneficiary designations will violate it. Should you be unable to make beneficiary changes to your life insurance policy, you may want to buy another one in consideration of your new spouse.

Take a look at irrevocable trusts. They can be used to provide for your spouse as well as your kids. Some people establish a separate property trust to provide for their spouse after their death while directing most or all of their real property to their children.

Those aforementioned pre-nups can play an estate planning role as well. They allow you to designate personal assets (such as assets within a college savings account) for existing rather than future children. Post-nuptial agreements (similar to pre-nups, but drafted after a marriage) can also accomplish this. Some states do not view pre-nup and post-nup agreements as legally valid, however – and sometimes carrying out the terms and conditions of these agreements is up to a judge.

Be sure to consult legal & financial professionals. When estates become this complex, collaboration with professionals having a thorough understanding of estate planning and tax issues is essential.

It can be awkward to talk about such matters, but many parents likely postponed discussing this topic for another reason: they wanted their kids to grow up with a strong work ethic instead of a “wealth ethic.”

If a child  grows up knowing he or she can expect a sizable inheritance, that child may look at family wealth like water from a free-flowing spigot with no drought in sight. It may be relied upon if nothing works out; it may be tapped to further whims born of boredom. The perception that family wealth is a fallback rather than a responsibility can contribute to the erosion of family assets. Factor in a parental reluctance to say “no” often enough, throw in an addiction or a penchant for racking up debt, and the stage is set for wealth to dissipate.

Instead, feel no shame in exerting some control. A significant percentage of families seek to define a purpose for transferred wealth. In CNBC’s survey, 32% of parents aged 55 or younger said they were going to specify what their heirs could use their inheritances for, and that was also true for 15% of parents aged 55-69 and 9% of parents aged 70 or older.

You may want to distribute inherited wealth in phases. A trust provides a great mechanism to do so; a certain percentage of trust principal can be conveyed at age X and then the rest of it Y years later, as carefully stated in the trust language.

This is a way to avoid a classic mistake: giving your heirs too much money at once. In fact, a 2015 Merrill Lynch Private Banking & Investment Group report notes that 46% of high net worth parents share that very concern.

Just how much is too much? Answers vary per family, of course. In the Merrill Lynch survey, 46% of families said that they wanted to avoid handing down the kind of money that would dissuade their heirs from realizing their full potential in their lives and careers.

By involving your kids in the discussion of where the family wealth will go when you are gone, you encourage their intellectual and emotional investment in its future. Pair values, defined goals, and clear purpose with financial literacy and input from a financial or legal professional, and you will take a confident step toward making family wealth last longer.

We may retire earlier than we think we will. Some of us envision leaving the workforce at “full” retirement age (66 or 67) so that we can receive “full” monthly Social Security benefits rather than slightly reduced monthly payments. Will that happen? It might not, according to data released this spring by the respected Employee Benefit Research Institute.

In EBRI’s most recent Retirement Confidence Survey, 21% of the respondents thought they would retire at age 65. Another 26% expected to retire at age 70 or later.

These expectations may not correspond with reality. In surveying current retirees, EBRI found that only 6% had worked into their seventies. Only 9% had retired at age 65. Sixty-five percent of the respondents had left work before age 65, up from 61% in EBRI’s 2010 survey.

We may see retirement as an extension of the present rather than the future. This is only natural, as we live in the present – but the present will not go on forever. Things change, and the costs we have to shoulder five or ten years from now may be greater than the expenses we face at the start of retirement. As many of us will likely be retired for 20 or 30 years, it becomes essential to take a long-term view of the retirement experience – which is why retirees may want to consider growth investing and long term care coverage.

Beyond that basic question, we need to think about insurance from a couple of other angles. Will we need long term care coverage? It seems to get more expensive each year, but as medicine and health care continue to advance and evolve, the possibility of a gradual rather than sudden death may increase. The wealthy may have the assets to contend with long term care costs, but the middle class rarely does. In Genworth’s 2015 Cost of Care Survey, the median annual cost for a semi-private room in a nursing home is $80,300. In California, it is $89,396; in Florida, $87,600.

Disability insurance and long term care coverage may prove more essential to retirement planning than many of us realize.

Age may catch up to us sooner rather than later. Generationally speaking, are we healthier than our parents and grandparents were? Anecdotally, it would seem so: we see people running 10Ks in their eighties, climbing mountains in their seventies, and so forth. Then again, we have diabetes and obesity plaguing American health.

We may be alone sooner than we assume. Many couples retire with a reasonable assumption that they will be together for some time – but something may happen to leave one spouse alone. As anyone who has ever lived alone realizes, a single person does not simply live on 50% of the income of a couple. Keeping up a house – or even a condo – could be arduous for an eighty-year-old man or woman. Driving is a concern. All this means that we may need someone or some group of people to care for us when our spouse is gone. Is that kind of support currently available? Could it be available twenty years from now? If not, what will take its place?

These are some of the blindspots that can surprise us in retirement. They may quickly affect our money and our quality of life. If we age with an awareness of them and recognize them in our retirement and estate planning, then we may be betterprepared when or if they emerge.

This is the perfect time of year to take that day, or maybe two, and untangle all the complexities of finances.

REBALANCING Financial Health day is as good a day as any to rebalance your retirement and other investment accounts. Better yet, see if automatic rebalancing is an option on your account and if so, agree to a rebalancing every three or six months.

FILE CABINETS We all take great care in assuring that we have security freezes on our credit files, which make it nearly impossible for anyone to open new accounts in our name. But does your identity theft prevention strategy fall short because you literally don’t lock the filing cabinet that houses all of your records?

Even if you aren’t worried about thieves getting into your files, consider the children who may live with you. At some point, they will probably become intensely curious about what you make and how much money you have. It’s probably a good idea to share this information with them at some point, but you want to do it on purpose at the right moment with the proper context.

PASSWORDS Where do you store all of your passwords and sign-on credentials? On the back of an old business card? In a little note pad in your wallet? In a notes program on your computer? Financial Health Day is a perfect time to not only update/review/ change all of your credentials, but to move them to a safer place for access. Try password protected cloud storage that can be accessed from your mobile device as well as your laptop. And throw away all of those hand-written notes!

BUDGETS  Does your household budget still include the babysitter you no longer employ? Or does it lack the new car payment? Financial Health Day is a perfect time to tune-up that budget to reflect a realistic financial picture of your household on a monthly basis. And then go the next step, and update your savings plan based on the financial picture you want at retirement. Take some time to put reality into your spending so that you can manage your expenditures better.