Estate Planning→
Your Future, Your Family, and Their Future
ESTATE PLANNING ATTORNEY IN Southern California
Estate planning is not just for the wealthy. Whether your estate is worth $2 million, $5 million, $50 million or $500 million, changes in laws and changes in lifestyles have made engaging in comprehensive estate planning vital for everyone.
When you have assets you wish to pass on to family, charity or others, crafting an estate plan—updating an existing one—can ensure that these assets are protected and distributed according to your wishes.
We have spent decades crafting estate plans for individuals and families in Southern California and the rest of the state.
Depending on your specific needs or goals, your estate plan will likely contain several tax, legal, or family-specific circumstance components. You might have already attempted estate planning before, but require an update because of changed circumstances in your life. Every estate plan must include these:
Wills: These can be a practical way to determine who should administer your estate after you die and who should receive your assets. It’s important to note that a will does not protect you and your property during any period of incapacity during your lifetime. Because it requires court administration, it could be a costly document for your heirs to administer.
Trusts: If you own significant assets, such as real estate, business interests, or investable assets, a well-drafted trust can help save your beneficiaries the difficulty of a legal proceeding, like probate or contests between beneficiaries.. Trusts can also help you accomplish specific goals, such as protecting assets you provide to beneficiaries.
Revocable living trusts are estate planning documents that allow you to remain in control of your personal and financial affairs while you are alive and well, letting you decide in advance how you want to be cared for.
Irrevocable trusts are more specialized planning documents in that they can be designed for making gifts, maintaining separate property, achieving an income, gift, or estate tax goal, or protecting beneficiaries from themselves or others’ claims against assets.
Advance medical directives: Who will speak for you if you are unable to communicate with your physicians and health care providers? What are your exact instructions to your doctors? An indispensable part of proper estate planning is an Advance Health Care Directive that can answer these questions. With it, you name a trusted individual to make medical decisions for you if you’re unable to do so on your own.
Incentives: This kind of estate planning involves wealth transfer through specially drafted trusts that contain instructions reflecting the love, care, and concerns of parents toward their children and grandchildren. A well-drafted incentive trust may include your personal set of instructions for passing your wealth on to your children or grandchildren while encouraging them to develop the types of skills and values that helped you acquire, maintain, and manage your wealth. For example, you may stipulate that a child-beneficiary make progress toward a degree to be eligible to receive all or some of the income from the trust.
Planning your estate now helps avoid unintended consequences later. In consultation with us, we will consider a variety of planning scenarios in order to design a comprehensive, tightly integrated estate or gift plan. Our goal is to help you make thoughtful, enforceable decisions regarding your estate.