Estate / Asset Protection

The goals of estate planning are to provide for your financial security while you're alive and to maximize your estate for your family and any charities following your death. Estate taxes will significantly impact the wealth you have accumulated unless you employ proper planning (see the chart on the following page). A well designed estate plan can help create and conserve assets during your life. In addition, effective planning can minimize estate taxes and estate settlement costs and deliver an orderly distribution of assets that helps meet your objectives.

To fully leverage estate preservation opportunities and develop strategies to achieve your distribution objectives, we consider:

Will and trust design strategies: Working with your attorney, we can review your legal documents to uncover whether they're up to date and what types of trusts are in place. Our analysis can determine whether your estate may be subject to costly delays in the probate process and the best possible solutions for this situation.
Property ownership alternatives: By titling your assets appropriately, you can avoid unnecessary taxation or probate exposure. We work with you to coordinate the three methods of estate distributions - beneficiary designation, joint titling and "own name" assets - and ensure that your primary and contingent beneficiaries are coordinated with your existing will and trust documents.
Estate tax reduction techniques: It's critical to determine your current estate tax liability and implement steps that will minimize estate settlement costs. These steps may include how to mitigate the impact of future estate growth and how to hedge the uncertainty of future estate tax legislation. We will help you take full advantage of the tax credits and deductions allowed by the Internal Revenue Code to reduce your estate tax burden.
Life insurance analysis: The arrangement of your current life insurance may be causing unnecessary taxation within your estate. You will need to determine your requirements for estate liquidity - both now and in the future - and may want to consider using discounts or leverage to pay estate settlement costs.
Qualified plan distribution: To avoid the significant drain that income and estate taxes can have on your qualified plan at death, your financial planner will suggest available strategies to minimize these costs.
Family gifting strategies: You may avoid a significant tax penalty if you restructure your existing will to utilize your unified credit during your life, rather than waiting until your death. Further, you may want to consider strategies that would allow you to gift money to your family, but retain certain control of your assets.
Charitable planning:If philanthropy is important to you, you should coordinate your lifetime giving with charitable planning at death. We can explore alternatives to leverage the tax advantages of charitable giving for you and your family. How do we design an effective estate plan for you? We have developed proprietary software to create an individualized "financial condition model" that:
- Addresses the financial consequences of your unique needs and objectives by taking into account the long-term impact of taxation, inflation, living expenses and each of the financial strategies you've already implemented;
- Estimates your annual cash flow (income and expenses) and asset growth over the full length of your life expectancy; and
- Determines, on an annual basis, the impact your existing estate planning techniques will have on your heirs.

Your "financial condition model" becomes the foundation for your estate plan. It is the essential tool for helping us determine the long-term adequacy of your financial resources. We work with you to identify the impact of possible future changes that can occur within your estate, and design strategies that help minimize any adverse effects.