What We Do
Explaining to you how we’re different requires an explanation of the “traditional” method of estate planning. Typically, estate planning is done on a transactional—once and done—basis with little to no counseling involved. If you’ve worked with a lawyer to prepare estate planning documents for you in the past, this will sound familiar.
- During the traditional experience, you meet with the lawyer only briefly. After all, he already knows your goals are the same as everyone else’s—to avoid probate and save taxes. The lawyer barely asks any questions before telling you when he will have the documents ready for your signature. Although you don’t really understand what’s in the documents he’s preparing or how your plan works, he seems smart and kind, so you trust him. After all, that’s why you hired an attorney, isn’t it? Because you want to do the right thing for your family, you’ll have the lawyer prepare documents for you and you’ll sign the documents, feeling relieved that you’ve got that taken care of. It does not even occur to you that you were not given the opportunity to make customizations specific to your family’s goals and needs.
- After signing the documents, you take your planning binder home, stick it on a shelf, mark estate planning off on your checklist and never think about it again.
- You vaguely remember your lawyer saying something about moving your assets into the trust so you’ll go to the bank, forget what you were supposed to do, call your lawyer’s office, get a voicemail, have to leave the bank and wait for a call back, (which takes several hours at least and sometimes days) and by that time, you’ll have gotten busy with other things and never get around to moving that bank account, or any of your other assets, into your trust.
- A few weeks later, you’ll get a bill in the mail for $67.50 for 15 minutes of your lawyer’s time for answering a couple of questions. You’ll make a mental note – don’t call lawyer ever again.
- Several years later, you’ll refinance your house or sell it and buy a new one and forget that you were supposed to let your lawyer know or make sure you kept the title in the name of the trust.
- Your children will get older, making your guardianship choices outdated, but you don’t want to call your lawyer because you know you’ll get a bill in the mail two weeks later.
- You’ll hear something about a change in the tax law, but you figure you’d surely get a letter in the mail from your lawyer if it was something that affected you, so you don’t worry about it. And, you’d have to dig through boxes to find your trust documents so you could remember your lawyer’s name and find her contact information. Who has time for that?
- It’s not until you become incapacitated or die and your family finds the binder you stuck up on a shelf several years before and never looked at again, that they realize your plan is so outdated that it has nothing to do with your life, your assets or the law.
- Your family is at a loss. They don’t know where to turn or what to do, so they contact the same lawyer you used to prepare the documents, who is happy as can be to probate your assets, which never made it into the trust, for a sizeable fee.
This is a sad story, but it happens all too often. Over 80% of trust based estate plans fail under the traditional model. This is why …
We Do Estate Planning Differently
Our practice is dedicated to comprehensive estate planning based on caring and confidential client counselling and thorough discussion of our clients’ goals, hopes, dreams, fears, and aspirations.
When you come to meet with us, we spend time learning about your family and what is important to you. We then use that insight to give you a myriad of planning ideas, and help you choose the options that are right for you.
We encourage communication with our clients. In fact, we’ve thrown out the time clocks so you never have to be afraid to call with a quick question (or even a not so quick question). Everything we do is billed on a flat-fee basis, agreed to in advance, so there are never any surprises.
We have a whole team to serve you. When you call our office to ask your quick question, you won’t have to wait hours or days for a phone call back. You’ll get your question answered, right away. And, if you need to schedule a more in-depth legal or strategic call with your personal lawyer, a call will be scheduled when you're both available and ready for the call so we can make the very best use of your time and not waste your time by leaving voicemail after voicemail back and forth.
Because trust funding is crucial to the success of your estate plan, we take on this responsibility ourselves. We make sure all your assets are re-titled properly so that your instructions in the trust control them and nothing will end up going through a long, expensive probate court process or being lost to the state because they were missed after your death.
Once your plan is in place, we assist you in maintaining it to ensure that it will work the way you expect when your family needs it. Your plan should be a living plan that changes with you over time as your life changes, your assets change, and the law changes. We have formal updating programs in place to keep your plan up to date year in and year out as well as give you access to our Trusted Team of Legal Experts for guidance on ANY legal or financial matter. One day you will need a lawyer. I don’t know why and I don’t know when, but when you do, you will be grateful you can call on us and we’ll be here to advise you or get you out of a jam.
Lastly, we believe you are more than your money. You also have a wealth of stories, life lessons and values. The intangible nature of this much greater wealth makes it difficult to capture and is most often lost when someone passes. How much do you know about your grandparents values? Their most prized personal possessions? How they felt about you? What they had learned during their lifetime? If you are like most people, you know very little about these things. We provide creative resources to encourage and assist you in passing down this “intangible” wealth to the next generation.
PS – if you think this all sounds expensive, well, you are right and you’re wrong. I can guarantee you that if you qualify to meet with a personal family lawyer, that planning is substantially less costly than it would be for your family if you died with a plan that didn’t work or if you didn’t have a plan in place at all. And, I’ve never had a single family who believed in this kind of planning and wanted to put it in place for their loved ones leave my office because they couldn’t afford it. We’ve made creative financing available to our clients because we know that this planning is the foundation for a life of success!