Optimize and protect your family’s future with a comprehensive estate plan
When you’ve accumulated any amount of wealth, it’s important to spell out in detail how that wealth gets transferred or passed down. Who do you want some, or all, of your wealth to be transferred to? You may have a favorite charity you regularly donate to or a foundation that revitalizes your local community you want to continue supporting after you’re gone. Since the people and things you care about can change over time, having an estate plan can ensure you are giving to the people and causes that matter most. Without an estate plan, everything you’ve worked for could be left to unintended family members as beneficiaries are determined by state law. Additionally, estate taxes may impact your beneficiaries’ inheritance in an unexpected and potentially avoidable way – leaving loved ones with much less than you originally intended. Fortunately, with the proper planning, you can easily mitigate or avoid many of these potentially negative consequences.
Estate planning is foundational to any financial plan. It allows you to be intentional about who will receive your assets and in what manner. It also allows you to be thoughtful about your own care and choose who will manage your finances should you become unexpectedly disabled. At the core, we recommend some basic estate planning. These include:
Estate planning should be an ongoing process, not a one-time event. Therefore, we recommend you revisit every three to five years, or at any significant lifetime event, to determine if any adjustments are needed based on your personal circumstances or changes to related laws.
Let’s take this discussion to a more personal level.
We want you to be able to maximize your legacy goals. A big potential hurdle to that could be estate and gift taxes. We have experts who can work with you to develop a plan to help you achieve your legacy goals in the most tax-efficient way and we continuously monitor the results of the plan. We then provide a comprehensive estate planning report detailing these results regularly and adjust the plan, as needed, to achieve your current and future objectives. So, whether you’re interested in intergenerational wealth transfer or philanthropic legacy planning – it’s you and your family’s goals that drive the estate planning process.
With most estate planning, one firm draws up your plan and a different firm implements it, which can leave room for some inefficiencies or miscommunications. At Aspiriant, our strategic planning department is a group of estate planning professionals, many with specialized tax law degrees, all focused solely on estate planning. We have a unique offering that streamlines the standard model. We not only create and help implement your plan, but we can monitor it over time and ensure the planning put in place is utilized effectively and efficiently. In addition, we are skilled at implementing advanced estate and transfer tax planning for complex estates (e.g., wealth transfer techniques such as Sales to Defective Grantor Trusts, Grantor Retained Annuity Trusts and Charitable Remainder Trusts to list a few).
Since our estate planning professionals are informed and integrated members of the Aspiriant team, your individual needs and goals are at the forefront of any estate planning process.
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