Planning for possible mental incapacity as well as administration and distribution of your estate and its assets after death is an important step for any responsible adult to take. Doing so will minimize the stress and legal difficulty that your family, loved ones, and beneficiaries will have to endure after your death.
The legal process known as probate is the court-supervised administration of a decedent’s estate. It is the default method of estate administration in the event that a person dies without a trust or other probate avoidance technique in effect. Although it is a functional process it is much more costly and time consuming than administering a decedent’s estate after death. In order to avoid the probate process after a death, it is important to have assets properly titled or have a living trust that is reviewed and updated occasionally to meet your current needs. We can evaluate your documents and circumstances and competently advise you if you need a living trust, need to update your current estate planning documents, or change the way you hold title to a given asset.
Since estate and gift taxes can result in a great financial burden on your family after your death, proper tax planning is important to achieve the greatest financial benefit for your family. We work with clients and their tax and financial advisors to evaluate options to save estate, gift and capital gains taxes. We regularly utilize many types of documents to attain optimal results for our clients, ranging from typical probate avoidance type trusts and related wills, powers of attorney and health care directives, to much more complex documents such as life insurance trusts, Qualified Personal Residence Trusts (QPRT’s), Grantor Retained Annuity Trusts (GRAT’s) as well as family limited partnerships, limited liability companies, and even educational and pet trusts.
We invite you to inquire about the creation of a new estate plan to protect your family or to do a review of existing documents that may need updating to achieve your goals.
