What is Estate Planning?

"What is Estate Planning?" is a common question among new clients.  This brief video blog is an introduction of what is estate planning.

What is Estate Planning?

"Estate Planning" is the process through which you design your legal estate plan. And because an estate plan, the legal strategy for managing one’s affairs and property, is unique to every person, Estate Planning is never a linear process of simply checking boxes or signing a template document.

At a minimum, professional Estate Planning takes into consideration:

• Your Spouse;
• Your Children;
• Priorities among family (including children from former or deceased spouses);
• Your health care wishes;
• Your end of life decisions;
• Your Long-Term Care strategy should you become incapacitated;
• Your desires for the future management of assets and liabilities, income/ estate/gift / and generation-skipping transfer tax risks;
• Care for a surviving spouse or a child with special needs or a family pet;
• The charities that are important to you;

and several other considerations that will be unique only to you.

Only after recognizing this interdependent legal, tax, family, financial, and other considerations affecting your estate plan, can your attorney begin to craft the set of Complimentary and Integrated documents that will coordinate the implementation of your Estate Plan for while you are alive and healthy, alive and incapacitated, and when you are gone.