Estate Planning
Estate Planning
Estate planning is the legal process of establishing how and to whom your assets and property will be distributed upon your incapacitation or death. Through estate planning, you can ensure that your loved ones are provided for after your passing. Additionally, estate plans can also minimize the amount of taxes your estate and/or heirs will incur once you’re gone.
While you should start estate planning as soon as you begin to acquire assets, it’s typically an ongoing process. It’s recommended to review your estate plan with your financial advisor every few years, following a major life event, or in the event that there are changes made to estate tax law. Doing so will ensure that your estate plan reflects your current wishes.
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Estate Planning in Southern Delaware
Estate planning encompasses much more than simply creating a will. It may also include:
- Analysis of primary legal documents: Wills, Powers of attorney, advance medical directives and trusts
- Estate liquidity analysis
- Account titling analysis from an estate perspective
- Delaware and County level estate and fee analysis
- Information transfer to heirs
- Advanced estate planning through trusts: IDGT’s, GRAT’s, ILIT’s, BDIT’s etc.
- Advanced charitable planning through trusts: CRAT’s, CRUT’s, Nimcrut’s, Flip-crut’s
- Matching Family legacies with their balance sheet
- Giving voice to generational planning in legal documents.
- Shifting focus from things to people in estate planning
- Special Needs trust planning for families with special needs.
- Life insurance, and Retirement account annual beneficiary audits
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Does This Sound Like You?
Key Concerns:
Stress of managing household
Coping with the loss of a loved one
Charity
Ages:
63
Summary:
Coping with the loss of her husband while being thrust into the position of the financial decision maker is daunting. Jane was looking for a firm to simplify the process and partner with her in the future.
Jane and her husband Richard ran a successful business, while also working as executives in the non-profit community, and were avid philanthropic contributors. They were living a wonderful life. They had a business worth more than 6 figures, retirement accounts totaling a million dollars, and everything was on track. Richard handled many of the personal finances, while Jane focused on the business. Sadly, Richard passed away rather suddenly, and Jane was forced with making decisions about her personal finances and her business in a very short period of time.
Jane is an incredibly competent and strong person, and expected incredibly strong and competent advisers to help navigate the financial loss of her husband, the sale of the business and the new responsibility of running the personal financial household. At Black Diamond we understand that this is an incredibly stressful period for Widow’s and Widowers, and we also understand that there are countless financial decisions that, handled incorrectly, cost people large sums of money. Helping clients thrust into running the financial household by outlining and mapping the complexities of wealth management is something we pride ourselves in.
Jane now has a partner she can bounce ideas off of, and trusts to look out for her best interest. She was happy to avoid the sales culture that many financial firms offer. Confident in her decisions, she is now actively leveraging her resources to provide as much impact on the charities she cares about as she can.
Please Note: The above Case Study is hypothetical and does not involve an actual client. Clients and prospective clients could experience different results while engaged with BDFS capital.
