Articles

ESTATE PLANNING, WILLS AND TRUSTS

The Firm provides estate planning for people with all kinds of circumstances and requirements. A few of the Firm’s most important goals in estate planning are:

• Assuring, regardless of the plan that the client selects, the client and his or her spouse retain sufficient assets to provide for their lives and support.
• Ensuring that the assets go to the people the client wanted them to go to on death.
• Providing guardianship for minors or mentally disabled people on the client’s death.
• Preserving funds that will be left to minor children by establishing appropriate trust instruments, to be paid out for support, educational, or other purposes, in accord with the client’s wishes.
• Selecting the right people or institutions to act in a fiduciary capacity, whether as personal representatives, trustees, guardians, conservators, or agents under a power of attorney.
• Minimizing estate, generation skipping, and income taxes.
• Making the administration of an estate or trust as convenient as possible and avoidance of ancillary probate if more than one state is involved.
• Providing for charitable tax savings and financially advantageous gifts of conservation easements.

To accomplish these ends, the Firm commonly uses any single or combination of the following modalities:
Joint tenancy; powers of attorney; simple and complex wills, wills with trusts, wills which pour assets into an existing trust, living wills; gifts to intended heirs, gifts to minors; revocable or living trusts, irrevocable trusts, residence trusts, generation skipping trusts, Totten trusts, life insurance trusts, other more exotic trusts; family partnerships, family limited partnerships, family corporations, family limited liability companies; conservatorships and guardianship.

The information you obtain at this site is not, nor is it intended to be, legal advice. You should consult an attorney for individual advice regarding your own situation.

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