Estate Planning as a Career

With all the investment opportunities available in the market, it is important to know what you’re getting into. Each type of investment has a number of risks and advantages.

There are several advantages to investing through an Investment Trust as opposed to investing directly into individual companies. Some of the main advantages are:

* You are leveraging the expertise of professional investors that have specific knowledge in the companies, markets and sectors considered for investment

* You can invest a small or large amount of money in the one investment (the investment trust itself), and you’ll immediately get a diversified portfolio since the trust will put your money into a variety of companies

* It makes it easy for you to build a monthly savings plan, since you can set aside a regular amount of money on a monthly basis for making payments into your Investment Trust.

* Investment Trusts are closed end funds, meaning that there are a fixed number of shares in circulation. The benefit of this is that the underlying price of these shares is driven by supply and demand, and it is not uncommon for Investment Trusts to trade at a discount to their net asset value.

* Investors that do not have the time to actively manage their investments can get the benefits of a management team to do this work for them.

* It is important to carefully evaluate any Investment Trust. Contact experienced Investment Trusts, ask the right questions and be confident that you are investing your money through expert investors.

If you would like to get started with an investment trust as soon as possible, provide SimplyFinance with a bit of information, and our specialists will put you in touch with investment advisors that will be able to answer all the questions you may have about investing in an investment trust. When you’re (more…)

Have you been told that you don’t need a revocable trust because you don’t own 2 million dollars worth of assets? This may be true if all you care about is estate taxes. However, the main reason for setting up a revocable trust is to avoid probate and the cost and inconvenience associated with it.

While a trust can minimize or eliminate estate taxes for persons with a net worth of over 2 million dollars, the benefits of avoiding probate are available to almost anyone. And there are plenty of benefits to avoiding probate.

Probate is expensive. In Florida, the law requires that the personal representative (or executor in other states) hire an attorney to help administer the probate estate. This same law suggests that a reasonable fee for that attorney is three percent of the total gross value of the property passing through probate. Add to that another three percent for the personal representative’s fee and you can begin to see how expensive probate can be.

If you own a $400,000 home and have $200,000 in investments, the six percent of fees can total $36,000. That’s money that your loved ones and heirs will not receive.

Compare this with the trust, where the trustee (person administering the trust) is usually a family member and does not charge a fee. The trustee is generally capable of administering most of the estate without help, and only hires an attorney for specific tasks. As a result, the legal fees are usually in the hundreds of dollars as opposed to the tens of thousands of dollars paid in probate.

Probate is also time consuming. The minimum time to administer an estate in Florida is five months and it is not unusual for a probate administration to last more than a year. On the other hand, many trusts, even those with large estates, have been administered in a matter of weeks.

Setting up and managing a revoc (more…)

Over the years we have all heard that we can do more with much less effort by understanding the power behind leverage. In this month’s column I would like to shed light on some powerful leverage options that you may want to considered during the estate planning process with clients.

Pose a problem and ask for a solution from four different advisors (Insurance professional, Investment professional, Attorney and an Accountant) and you will get four different solutions, each from a different perspective. This is because different advisors have different opinions it’s difficult to know who’s right. When this occurs, more often than not, the end result is….NOTHING! The client does nothing, because he or she isn’t sure who or what is correct. “This is why estate planning doesn’t work! That’s right, traditional estate planning does not work.” This is exactly what Gordon a successful planner in the wealth creation and preservation field said during a recent meeting we had with mutual clients. As they sat listening intently in our office as Gordon successfully recreate the thinking behind their dad’s decision to create a wealth preservation plan that modeled his life values.

“Didn’t our dad already have an estate plan?” David’s son and daughter asked. They just couldn’t understand why their dad, as a retired small business owner, had engaged in wealth planning at age 78, after he had already done estate planning when he had retired from his business over 13 years ago.

As I listened to their questions and concerns. Gordon answered, “David, your dad wanted to leave his family an inheritance of more than just his money. He wanted to pass on his ethical will and values and he wanted to leave a lasting legacy to his community.”

“It’s all about dreams and fingerprints. That’s what people want to use their wealth for. Gordon continued. “Hav (more…)