Can We Save Your Family $3 Million or More on Your Current $1.3 Million Estate?

Perhaps.  More and more, our Firm has the pleasure of working with two or three generations of the same client family.  The conversation often starts with an inquiry from a family member who is between 40 and 70 years old.  We either start with their comprehensive estate planning, or with their parents’ or surviving grandparent’s asset protection planning, before moving to their young adult children’s “simple Will” planning.  The first phone call often includes the question, “How much do you charge for a Will?”   The caller generally agrees with my suggestion that it would be more pertinent to find out how much it is likely to cost to plan, then update for several decades, and finally settle their particular estate, including legal fees and estate taxes.

A seasoned financial advisor recently visited our offices.  He was looking for an estate planning attorney to work with, and was referred by another advisor whose grandmother and then father have been my clients.  I asked the visiting advisor to choose one of his clients that we could run cost / benefit projections on.  He chose a 60-year-old couple with a current estate size of $2.6 million.  (The same projections would apply to a 45-year-old couple with a current estate of $1.3 million, or to a 52-year-old couple with a current estate of $2 million.)  We ran projections for the clients’ three planning options: (1) do nothing / stay with their old Wills or no Wills; (2) do typical tax-planned Wills and leave them in the attorney’s vault for the average 20 years before an update or probate; and (3) create and maintain a comprehensive plan with our Partners In TrustTM program, which is unique in New Jersey, and continues beyond our clients’ possible relocation to another state. 

We tallied the projected costs of planning, updating, and settling his clients’ estates each of the three ways, including legal fees, Federal estate tax, and New Jersey estate tax.  We agreed that, for this couple, the likely end results of (1) doing nothing, and (2) doing typical tax-planned Wills were about the same.  We also agreed that the probable end result of utilizing our Partners In Trust program was a savings of $3 million – or $4 million if the clients eventually choose to live for 183 days a year in Florida or another of the 33 states that have no separate estate tax.  Beyond that, the Partners In Trust option also changes the line entries for “To Heirs’ Creditors” from a question mark to a zero, because it can afford the surviving spouse and children a lifetime of asset protection on their inheritances.

I would like to demonstrate the projections I have discussed above.  More importantly, I would enjoy projecting your current estate, your estimated joint life expectancy, and your choice of annual growth rate in a private Counselling Choices Consultation.  If you would like to make a fully informed decision on your estate planning options, please call to schedule a Consultation, then take a few minutes to complete and bring the three-page Confidential Information Form that you can download by clicking on the Contact Us button of our home page.  I look forward to speaking with you, and to perhaps working with two or three generations of your family.