Want an easy exercise in willpower? Plant yourself in a bookstore and force yourself to ignore the shelves where the estate-planning manuals are. Between their complexity and their suggestion of your own mortality, the books aren’t hard to resist. Unfortunately, though, the need for good estate-planning advice is greater than ever. Changes brought on by the 1976 tax act make nearly everything you’ve ever heard about trusts and gift-giving obsolete. A multitude of guides for the perplexed are available — but some books are too brief to be of much use, and those that haven’t been revised since 1976 do more damage than good.

Helpful or not, all the new books are progeny of Norman Dacey’s 1965 bestseller, How to Avoid Probate! (still available but out of date). Dacey’s do-it-yourselfer for setting up living trusts has been roundly denounced by lawyers as simplistic. Such criticism is valid; estate planning certainly requires the aid of a skillful counselor. Still, Dacey must be commended for provoking the legal profession—and thus spurring three California lawyers to write useful and up-to-date books.

A dictatorial title

Estate Planning: What Anyone Who Owns Anything Must Know, the best of the lot, also requires the most time to read. Despite its dictatorial title, Peter Lippett’s book doesn’t push any particular estate plan on the reader, as some books do. The author writes that because “this just plain ain’t a simple world,” varying state laws and family circumstances prevent his designing individual plans. Instead he provides a more valuable service by sizing up common estate-planning methods, giving special attention to their tax consequences.

For instance, Lippett says that the once popular technique of avoiding estate taxes through an irrevocable living trust has lost much of its allure since 1976. Letting someone hold and manage your assets in a trust for the benefit of others still makes sense for people with sizable estates, and for all but the richest of them a revocable trust is the most desirable way.

Both types of trusts can avoid the costs and delays of a probate court, but Lippett cautions against exaggerating the importance of this legal sidestep. Succumbing to probatephobia can get expensive. For example, a married couple may own their entire $300,000 estate in joint tenancy, so that when the first dies the survivor will automatically inherit everything. This way, they’ll escape paying about $12,000 in tax-deductible probate fees to people who administer the estate. When the survivor dies, however, the heirs will be faced with a federal estate tax bill of more than $40,000. Had the couple provided for a trust in their wills and paid the probate fees, they would have escaped all those taxes.

Unlike Lippett, Arnold Kahn in Family Security Through Estate Planning maintains that picking an estate plan is a cinch. All you need to do, he says, is estimate your net worth and pick one of his “seven basic estate plans’’ that matches your figure. For the reader with an estate between $250,000 and $750,000, Kahn has determined that Plans Three or Four are the best choices. But estate planning can’t be quite that effortless. No two $250,000 people are alike, nor are their family’s needs. It’s misleading to package tidy estate plans as if they were.

The seven plans work best as a primer for the reader who cringes at the mere mention of estate planning. The book’s casual tone and examples featuring the likes of Waldo Wealthy help make a drab subject nearly come alive. Chapters run short and the advice, though sometimes sketchy, is often worthwhile. One instructive chapter on preparing for an estate-planning conference encourages wives to take an active role in decisions to “ensure implementation of the estate plan with a minimum of friction.”

Charles Hemphill Jr.’s Wills and Trusts offers practical advice about his first subject but words such as “corpus” and “testamentary disposition” creep into the trust section and muddy it. The book gives the reader no excuse for dying without a will, as Abraham Lincoln did. That risks leaving your estate in the wrong hands and costs your heirs additional court fees. Hemphill says that no matter how simple your will, it’s wise to get a lawyer’s approval. This is especially important for people who move a lot, since a valid will in California may be rubbish in New York.

Estate Planning: What Anyone Who Owns Anything Must Know, by Peter E. Lippett. Reston Publishing, 1979.376 pages. $14.95.

Family Security Through Estate Planning, by Arnold D. Kahn. McGraw-Hill, 1979.198 pages. $10.95.

Wills and Trusts, by Charles F. Hemphill Jr. Prentice Hall, 1980. 244 pages. $5.95.