Personal estate plans that reflect yours and your loved ones’ needs can help ease financial burdens for them in the future. New guidance from the IRS takes both yours and your spouse’s estate tax exemptions into consideration, allowing for the option to elect “portability” of your exemptions in certain cases. This opportunity can help to alleviate financial stress for those who have unfortunately lost a spouse, but its implementation is time sensitive, so it’s important to know how and when to act.

Many people think of an estate plan as a way for their assets to be distributed in the future, after their deaths. However, in some situations, it may be more advantageous to make at least some of those planned gifts now—and help your loved ones avoid some of the financial burden of estate taxes. Especially for individuals with high net worth, taxes could become much greater when the currently increased lifetime exemption amount “sunsets” on January 1, 2026.

Because few people want to think about the circumstances where their estate plan would come into play, even fewer think about the consequences if their estate plan may not be able to be carried out as they wished. This most frequently occurs in the event that designated individuals are unable to perform the duties allotted to them. Here are a few of the roles for which you should designate a back-up in your estate plan—and what could happen if you don’t.