Estate Planning: Protect Your Future Today, Your Family's Tomorrow

The lifetime gift/estate tax exemption is $13.9M in 2025. For couples making joint gifts, $27.9M. This exemption has allowed affluent families pass along substantial wealth tax-free. Sunset provision is upon us through the end of 2025, after that, the amounts are scheduled to return to 2017 levels in 2026. Adjusted for inflation, the single taxpayer limit would drop back to an estimated $7M, or $14M for couples.

For the 99% of the population without this level of concern. Gifting strategies allow for $16k per year, $32k per couple. Estate planning can benefit tax planning on more basic levels as well. Facilitating smooth asset transfer, and safeguarding your beneficiaries to minimize conflicts and complexities to ensure your desires are executed wihtout concern.

Creating an estate plan or a financial plan is not a one-time endeavor. It is essential to revisit these plans throughout your life, especially after significant events like marriage, divorce, the arrival of a child, or the loss of a loved one, which may necessitate updates to your existing arrangements. Regularly reviewing and adjusting your legal documents and financial goals as your situation evolves is crucial.

By merging financial planning with estate planning, you can gain a thorough and insightful view of your financial landscape, encompassing your assets, liabilities, income, and expenses. This knowledge empowers you to make well-informed choices about your financial future and the enduring legacy you intend to leave.

If your income reaches a certain limit, you lose the option to save within a ROTH retirement account, unless you’re lucky enough to have a ROTH 401k option at work. Most have traditional 401K, 403B, 457, or IRAs, all taxable accounts, all with required minimum distributions in your early to mid 70s.

Following retirement account rules and restrictions, funding amounts are for the most part unlimited, minimum age to access funds, not trigger penalties are all details that require a strategy to live well in retirement.

Estate planning means strategically understanding which accounts to access in the best order to minimize taxes, and maximize distributions, all while positioning your assets in such a way that you’ve lived your best retirement, and left the best legacy possible.

One day your business is your life. One day you’ll decide it can’t be. Your going to want to monetize it as much as possible to walk away with the best possbile exit strategy. You’ll need business valuations and plans to make the most of what you spent your life building.

Business succession planning needs to occur long before debating when to retire. Estate planning can help design a plan for how to walk away while minimizing taxes from a sale, and securing a dedicated stream of income. This allows for more options to fully enjoy the lifestyle you desrve, and stage a legacy for your family.

It is common for you to feel that you need to choose to live for yourselves, or live for the legacy of the family you wish to leave behind. The truth is, with proper estate planning, one does not have to come at the cost of the other.

Whatever legacy you wish to create will be improved by planning for it. Substantial or thoughtful, your family wants you to live out the life you deserve. No matter what, you will help them start a future legacy of their own. 

Estate planning goes hand in hand with financial planning. As you are planning for your next chapter, part of that represents the “what ifs”. In that planning, you consider how your spouse will continue without you, you without them. The things like going from married filing jointly to single, less pension now so a percentage continues to your spouse, taking social security earlier or later, working an extra year or two, are all factors that can change the outcome.

Estate planning can protect not just the income for retirement, but what it could mean when you are not there to see things through.

Apart from your altruistic inclination to leave financial support to the meaningful causes in your life, estate planning can create a unforeseen windfalls.

Your bequests can be larger by leveraging estate planning. When RMDs come along, and income sources exceed your needs, planning can potentially reduce taxable income. If you were to transfer ownership and beneficiary designation you or your heirs could gain a tax deduction. Estate and tax planning allow us to design this based on your needs.

Even if an income is needed, using life insurance instruments, you could structure a charitable gift annuity, even a charitable remainder unitrust, or an annuity trust life income gift can become a gift that pays you an income during your lifetime.