indiana injury and family lawyer blog

When an adult can no longer make decisions, whether from a stroke, advancing dementia, a serious accident, or another loss of capacity, someone still has to pay the bills, manage the property, and make medical choices. If that person planned ahead, a trusted agent steps in quietly. If they did not, the alternative is guardianship: a court proceeding in which a judge decides who will act and then supervises that person going forward. Most Indiana families would rather avoid guardianship, and Indiana law gives them the tools to do it, as long as the documents are in place before capacity is lost.

The catch is timing. Every one of these tools requires the signer to have capacity at the moment they sign. Once capacity is gone, the planning window has closed, and the family is left with the court process the planning was meant to prevent.

What Guardianship Looks Like in Indiana

Indiana’s guardianship law, found in Article 29-3 of the Indiana Code, allows a court to appoint a guardian for an adult the court finds to be an incapacitated person, meaning someone unable to manage their property or care for themselves because of a condition the statute describes. The process starts with a petition, notice to family, and a hearing. If the court appoints a guardian, that guardian generally answers to the court through an inventory, periodic accountings, and sometimes prior approval for significant decisions.

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For several years, families who inherited an IRA or a 401(k) got a reprieve from a confusing distribution rule while the IRS worked out the details. That reprieve has ended. Starting with the 2025 tax year, the inherited IRA 10-year rule is being enforced as written, and the penalty relief that applied from 2021 through 2024 no longer does. For a great many Indiana families, retirement accounts are among the largest assets they will ever pass on, which makes this a change worth understanding before a death forces the question.

Two groups feel the rule most directly. The first is the adult children and other non-spouse beneficiaries who will inherit these accounts. The second is Indiana families who named a revocable living trust as the beneficiary of a retirement account, often years ago, under rules that no longer apply. A trust written for the old system can now produce a result the family never intended.

What the Inherited IRA 10-Year Rule Requires Now

The SECURE Act of 2019 ended the long-standing practice of stretching inherited retirement account distributions over a beneficiary’s lifetime. In July 2024, the IRS issued final regulations (T.D. 10001) confirming how the rule works, and those regulations apply for distribution years beginning January 1, 2025.

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Most people now keep a meaningful part of their lives online: email, photographs, bank and brokerage logins, social media, cloud storage, and increasingly digital currency. Far fewer have thought about what happens to those accounts if they die or lose the ability to manage their own affairs. Indiana answers that question through a statute on access to digital assets, the Revised Uniform Fiduciary Access to Digital Assets Act. Knowing how it works, and how to plan around it, can spare your family a frustrating stretch of locked accounts at an already hard time.

The law sets out who may reach your digital assets and under what conditions. The part that surprises people is that a will or power of attorney, on its own, often is not the deciding factor. A provider’s own tools and policies can carry more weight than the documents you signed with an attorney, unless you take a specific step the statute recognizes.

How Indiana’s Digital Assets Law Works

The Revised Uniform Fiduciary Access to Digital Assets Act, adopted in Indiana in 2016 and codified at Indiana Code Article 32-39, governs access by four kinds of fiduciaries: the personal representative of a deceased person’s estate, an agent acting under a power of attorney, a trustee, and a court-appointed guardian. The statute lets these fiduciaries request access to digital assets from the company that holds them, which the law calls the custodian.

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A federal tax law signed in the summer of 2025 changed the numbers that drive estate tax planning, and the headlines that followed left many Indiana families wondering whether their own plans need attention. The short answer for most Hoosier households is reassuring, though it carries a caution worth understanding. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act set the federal estate tax exemption at $15 million per person starting January 1, 2026, and made that figure permanent rather than letting it drop at the end of 2025 as prior law required. For a married couple, that shelters up to $30 million from federal estate tax. Very few families in Lake County, or anywhere else in Indiana, will ever approach that threshold.

That reality should shift where your attention goes. The real risk for most Indiana families lies elsewhere, in the parts of a plan that decide whether your wishes actually get carried out.

What the $15 Million Federal Estate Tax Exemption Actually Changed

Under the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017, the exemption had been roughly doubled, sitting at $13.99 million per person in 2025. That increase carried an expiration date. Without congressional action, the exemption was scheduled to fall back to around $5 million per person, adjusted for inflation, on January 1, 2026.

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Few things frustrate Indiana families more than presenting a valid power of attorney to a bank and being told it will not be accepted. The refusal typically comes at a moment of genuine need, when a parent has been hospitalized or a spouse can no longer manage accounts independently. Instead of cooperation, the agent is told the document is too old, that the institution requires its own form, or that the compliance department needs additional review.

Indiana law addresses this problem directly. Under Indiana Code § 30-5-9-9, an institution that refuses to honor a valid Indiana power of attorney within three business days faces significant liability, including treble damages, attorney’s fees, and prejudgment interest. The statute gives agents real leverage, yet most families never learn about it until the rejection has already caused harm.

What Indiana Law Requires When an Institution Refuses a Power of Attorney

An Indiana transfer-on-death deed can keep real estate out of probate, and for many families that is exactly the right tool. The problem is that a transfer-on-death deed used in isolation, without fitting it into the rest of the estate plan, often creates gaps that surface only after someone has died. At that point, the property may end up in probate anyway, the wrong person may hold title, or the family may face a creditor claim they assumed the deed would prevent.

Indiana’s Transfer on Death Property Act, codified at Indiana Code § 32-17-14-11, allows property owners to name a beneficiary who will receive real estate automatically at death. The deed is revocable during the owner’s lifetime, does not require delivery to the beneficiary, and does not give the beneficiary any present interest in the property. Those features make it attractive. They also make it easy to treat the deed as a standalone fix, when it really needs to work alongside every other piece of the plan.

How Title Type Determines Whether an Indiana Transfer-on-Death Deed Works at All

When a family trust reaches the administration phase, beneficiaries usually care about two things right away. They want to know what assets exist, and they want to know where the money went. An Indiana estate planning attorney will tell you that trustee accounting disputes rarely start with dramatic accusations. They start with missing documentation, unclear trust language, and a trustee who believes a decision was authorized even though a beneficiary reads the trust differently.

A February 9, 2026, Indiana Court of Appeals opinion is a useful example. The dispute involved a beneficiary seeking a statement of accounts and co-trustees asking a court to confirm that a surviving settlor could remove a piece of trust property after the other settlor’s death. The trial court granted summary judgment against the co-trustees. The Court of Appeals reversed and remanded, focusing on how the trust language fit together and how the trust treated tenancy-by-the-entireties property.

The Trust Fight That Landed in Court

Indiana estate planning often changes quietly through code cleanups and committee work, then the practical impact shows up later when a family needs a guardianship, a trust administration, or a probate filing on a short timeline. Attorney Burton Padove sees the real-world side of this process, where a plan that looked fine years ago now runs into updated procedures, new study priorities, or revised statutory language. Senate Bill 71, a 2026 session measure titled “Various probate matters,” is a good example, since it does not rewrite the entire probate system today, yet it sets up the next round of revisions and recodification work, with an effective date tied to mid-2026.

What Senate Bill 71 Does in 2026

SB 71 is not a single-issue bill. The bill includes probate-related provisions and establishes a task force to revise the temporary guardianship code. The task force structure matters for Indiana families and practitioners, since guardianship filings often serve as a pressure valve when incapacity planning is missing or a power of attorney does not function in practice. The bill materials reflect that the guardianship task force is designed to study recodification and needed changes, then issue recommendations, rather than pushing a full rewrite through one bill cycle.

SB 71 also addresses how Indiana studies probate and trust issues going forward. The committee substitute language provides for repealing the Probate Code Study Committee and shifting the study function to the Interim Study Committee on Courts and the Judiciary in even-numbered years, with an express study mandate that reaches probate, trust code, and other statutes affecting estates, guardianship, probate jurisdiction, trusts, and fiduciary administration.

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