Estate Planning

Estate Planning is the process of determining how your wealth and assets should be transferred to the heirs of your choice: your children, grandchildren, friends, families, charitable causes, etc. and then deciding which legal tools and structures to use to best meet your estate planning goals.

Estate planning is not simply reducing or eliminating taxes and avoiding probate.  Only after establishing how you want your estate’s assets to be distributed should you consider ways to reduce taxes and avoid probate. From there, good estate plans deal with a host of other issues. Now, with all but a few estates exempt from the federal estate tax, those other issues are, or should be, at the forefront of estate planning.

An estate plan is to ensure that you are taken care of the rest of your life and that your wealth is transferred to the people you want to have it. A good estate plan ensures these goals are accomplished with as much efficiency and as little cost as possible. An estate plan addresses the management and distribution of an individual’s property and financial obligations after he or she dies with financial tools such as wills, revocable living trusts and power of attorney.

For a comprehensive overview of Estate Planning, please start with our article:

• What is Estate Planning – A Comprehensive Overview

Estate Planning Basics

The Multi-State Estate Plan

Publication: Retirement Watch Weekly

Readers with homes or other property in more than one state should take special care in their estate plans. There are lawyers who advise drafting separate wills and other Estate Planning documents for each state involved. You shouldn’t need to do that much work. The estate plan, however, does need to recognize that multiple states […]

Estate Planning Strategies

How to Build the Family Venture Capital and Loan Fund

Publication: Retirement Watch Weekly

Most people want to help their children and grandchildren, but they want to provide more than money. One goal is to ensure the future generations are hard-working and productive citizens who have initiative. Another goal is to perpetuate the family’s values. One of the values in some families is entrepreneurship. By encouraging entrepreneurial activities in […]

Trusts

Simple Ways to Build Bullet-Proof Trusts

Publication: Retirement Watch Weekly

Estate planners love trusts. They solve many problems and help achieve goals. In recent years, trusts have moved from the estate plans of the very wealthy into the plans of many families. Too often, however, trusts operate as bombs that explode and shred estate plans. Fortunately, there are simple steps that will avoid the common […]

Trusts

How to Find the Best State to Place Your Trusts

Publication: Retirement Watch Weekly

Trusts today often are key to providing for the futures of grand-children. Trusts even can protect assets so that they last for multiple generations. Traditionally, a trust would be set up in the trust creator’s state of residence or in the state where the key beneficiaries reside. Sometimes, the creator favored a particular trustee and […]

Estate Planning Strategies

Essential Tips and Strategies for Family Businesses

Publication: Retirement Watch Weekly

Business owners have unique concerns along with the usual estate planning issues. Business owners fear that the heirs might have to sell or dismantle the business and that the wrong people might run it. Those results can be avoided, but the owner must plan carefully and implement the plan. The first major estate planning issue […]

Estate Planning Basics

The Basics of Building an Estate Plan

Publication: Retirement Watch Weekly

Estate Planning is coming back on radar screens. Uncertainty over the direction of estate taxes and the probability that the estate tax would be eliminated caused many people to ignore their plans the last few years. They did not want to spend time and money on a plan that might be unnecessary or need major […]