Wealth Preservation

A basic estate plan allows you to decide who will receive your assets upon your death by enabling you to pass additional wealth to your loved ones. Trusts are legal vehicles used to protect assets before and after you pass to ensure they are allocated properly and protected against unwanted tax implications.

Our planning process includes practical solutions and creative planning alternatives to help meet your personal objectives. If your goal is to preserve more assets for your family, while significantly reducing taxes and expenses, our professional team will collaborate with your current legal and accounting advisors to develop an appropriate plan for you.

Our Approach to estate planning includes:

• We first review your current legal documents (Wills, Trusts, Health Directives, Powers of Attorney)
• We then construct comprehensive tax and cash flow models
• This allows you to see how different planning techniques affect your overall financial picture, and impacts individual family members.

Your financial models will analyze:

• Gift tax
• Family partnerships and defective trust planning
• Multi-generational/legacy maximization strategies
• Comprehensive insurance review
• Funding techniques including: split dollar and exit strategies for companies or individuals
• Charitable planning alternatives including remainder trust planning

Many people think that estate planning only involves the writing of a will. Estate planning also involves financial, tax, medical and business planning. A will is part of the planning process, but you will also need other legal documents to fully address your estate planning needs.

We work with you and will meet with your existing counsel to help optimize the impact of planning. We monitor current legal, insurance and economic conditions to make sure your plan is both appropriate and compliant with any recent developments and will advise you accordingly. Keeping a vigilant watch over industry and tax law changes is one of the most important services we provide to you.

Life insurance can be used both as an asset class and as a wealth preservation tool for business owners and affluent families. Advanced wealth preservation planning strategies utilize sophisticated life insurance based solutions to accomplish a range of business, trust, and affluent family legacy objectives. 

If tax efficiency and asset protection from unjust lawsuits are important to your family, a properly designed life insurance strategy can help with these goals and more. We design strategies through our understanding of the many advanced planning options available for striving to protect and transfer family and business wealth.

Why Life Insurance for Business Owners and Affluent Families

• Immediacy and simplicity of wealth transfer
• Provides liquidity for the estate tax
• Minimal transfer (gift) tax for creation of large asset outside of taxable estate
• Helps to insulate, complement, and hedge other estate planning techniques
• Tax-favored asset class; income tax favored and estate tax favored (if owned properly)
• Non-correlated, defensive, conservative asset with strong risk adjusted returns

Our Approach to Life Insurance Planning:

Our process starts with a simple review of your existing insurance coverage. We test policy performance and identify existing gaps, risks and opportunities for potential coverage improvement. From there, with your permissions, we can integrate sophisticated insurance strategies where appropriate into your comprehensive wealth management plan.

If you are like many of our clients, you plan on living a long time and enjoying a full retirement that may last 30 years or more. You have spent years saving for retirement, investing wisely, living within your means……doing everything within your power to have the retirement you dreamed of.  

However, if you look around, you see your friends or family members living longer and spending more of their elder years in long term care facilities or being cared for at home by family members. Thinking about and preparing for a serious illness or accident that may place you or someone you love into a situation that requires long term care is difficult at any age. Have you really prepared for that moment?

Our Approach to Long Term Care Planning:

Are you aware of the numerous factors that must be considered when dealing with the high cost of nursing care for a loved one in an extended care facility or home environment? Will Medicare or Medicaid benefits step-in and pay for your long term care in a long term care facility……..and what if they don’t?  The fact is, each of the government programs pays something but there are specific facts and circumstances which determine what, how much and when benefits will actually be paid.

The critical mistake we often see is families underestimate the costs of long term care services and overestimate the amount of public funding available to pay those costs.

The solution to funding the high cost of long term care services must be shouldered by each individual or family and their personal resources. As part of the overall long term care planning process, we can help you understand the role of a properly structured long term care insurance policy to manage risk. Whether a traditional policy or hybrid long term care policy is best for you, the goal of coverage is always the same:    

• Have the insurance company pay long term care expenses of 10-12k/month for services in a facility or at home, and
• Help you avoid liquidating all of their assets in order to pay for care – thus preserving a lifetime of assets for your spouse or family.  

In the end, having the right long term care insurance shoudl bring confidence to you and your family.