Wills and Trusts

wills-and-trustsWills and Trusts

Together, wills and trusts comprise the backbone of your estate plan. Your will directs what happens to your property, who will raise your children, and related instructions on how your holdings should be passed along to your loved ones. A trust serves as a central hub, providing for the management, control, and distribution of assets during your life and after death. We bring five generations of legal experience to bear to help you choose the right estate planning options to transfer wealth and provide for any minor children or incapacitated family members for whom you are responsible.

Wills

A will can be a relatively simple document to ensure that your wishes are met, and to provide insight and direction about the management of the assets your beneficiaries receive. Our experience with multi-generational families and inter generational dynamics make us the right choice to streamline even the most straightforward passing of wealth from one spouse to another, or to navigate the more complex transfer of assets to subsequent generations. This process can involve children, grandchildren, spouses, and former spouses, investment accounts, financial advisors, business holdings and properties, to name a few, all of which need to be accounted for.

Trusts

We often recommend establishing a trust to further manage estate transfers, especially when it comes to complex estate plans. We counsel on revocable living trusts that allow you to retain ownership of your property during your lifetime and for your heirs to inherit your property outside of probate court. We also advise on trusts to manage your estate on behalf of your beneficiaries, create a plan for managing your assets if you become incapacitated, establish requirements for beneficiaries to receive their inheritance, or to preserve assets to care for any minor children. Our estate planning team can help you navigate these and other trust options, including charitable trusts, generation-skipping trusts, bypass trusts and more, depending on what you need the trust to do. We structure each unique trust vehicle to carry out your wishes, often encompassing shelters from estate and gift tax or other ways to minimize tax liability on your assets.