Estate Planning & Gifting

Planning for your loved ones in the event you become disabled or die can be emotionally challenging for some people. It’s not uncommon for people to put this off for years to avoid the difficult feelings that come with thinking about your own disability or demise.

We seek to make this process easier for you. We have a full understanding of your finances and can help explain what would happen to your assets in a disability or death scenario based on your current plan (or lack thereof).

We can talk through which key people you might rely upon to help with various roles such as:

• guardian for your children
  
• owner to your pets
  
• who to make financial decisions for you if you’re unable to do so yourself or for your heirs if you’ve passed away
  
• who to make medical decisions for you, and so on.

We can spot inefficiencies and opportunities to save on estate taxes and help get your money to the right people in the most efficient way.

Once we have a general plan you’re comfortable with, we can engage a professional estate attorney with you to provide feedback on the plan, further strategize, and create the necessary legal documents.

The legal documents can be lengthy and many clients find them difficult to understand. We see our role as an advocate for you. Knowing what you want to accomplish, we can review the documents to confirm it aligns with your wishes. If desired, we can work with your estate attorney to implement any desired changes.

Once your estate documents are prepared, we will help you implement the plan if you’re part of our comprehensive, ongoing wealth management service. This typically entails updating your beneficiary designations and re-titling assets if trusts were created. We can assist with this step, even for accounts and assets not under our management. For one-time financial planning clients, we create a list of to-do items for your own implementation.

Many of our clients desire to share their wealth with causes or people they care about. We are skilled at various gifting strategies to optimize both income and estate taxes. From simple cash gifts to more complicated transfers of investment or business assets outright or in trusts, we can help you evaluate potential strategies and land on the right one for you.

We are knowledgeable about various gifting strategies such as:

• stock gifts
  
• donor advised funds
  
• foundations
  
• charitable trusts
  
• gift annuities
  
• grantor and spousal trusts
  
• irrevocable trusts