Estate Planning as a Career

A Philosophical Shift in the Delivery of Client Professional Services

A Failure to Serve Effectively

The delivery of professional services, especially today, is at a critical crossroads. Clients are too often provided with advice that fails to be best-in-class and fails to integrate the client’s ideas for their best life, lifestyle and legacy. With business succession and family wealth transfer failure rates at nearly 70% world wide, and 3rd generation businesses virtually non-existent, there is clearly a need to change the process in how professional services are delivered to a client.

Research on the subject of business succession, estate and wealth transfer indicates that the failures are not due to governing law or tax systems but rather because our future generations are not being adequately prepared for these inevitable events. In addition, the general professional community has failed to develop an effective way to discover what matters most to their clients prior to offering their solutions.

The professional community has now transitioned into an era of independent specialists working separately on behalf of clients. This is unfortunate.

While specialization is beneficial, it leaves out the bigger picture issues of a client’s dreams and purpose. It is rare in today’s advisory environment to find professionals who collaborate together on the dynamic solutions critical to helping clients achieve the kinds of lives they have always dreamed about having. This results in “piecemeal planning,” which might provide a client with an accurate legal or tax structure, but ignores a greater and more important question: how does this fit together in the client’s life and for the client’s greatest benefit? All too often the opportunity for the best in effecti (more…)

The creation of offshore trusts and other financial plans is a way of shielding your assets from the laws of the nation in which you reside. It can sometimes be used to remove one of the two certainties of life; taxes. Americans are far less likely than the citizens of other countries to put assets abroad because, although when you receive the benefits of being free of your country’s laws regarding assets (namely taxation) you also lose the aspect of those laws that are designed to protect your assets. Americans are far more likely to just accept taxes, because our country has an enviable financial system that people around the world wish to participate in already. However, many people would like to know more about offshore banking options for a portion of their wealth because they view taxes as an all too unnecessary evil. Whenever we read stories about the government buying a hammer for $500 from a certain large corporation (Name omitted to avoid liability) as part of a no bid contract, we may begin to entertain the idea of placing personal assets offshore.

Another reason many Americans decide not to use offshore asset protection options is that they are advised by their attorneys not to do so. This is because offshore asset protection (while desirable) is a topic that your attorney may be very unfamiliar with and therefore uneasy guiding you through it. Attorneys are as afraid of being sued for malpractice as any other professional person is and while most estate planning attorneys in the United States understand the laws that govern asset protection domestically, they are not as well versed in protecting their clients’ interests abroad.

For that reason, many well-intentioned, responsible and highly-able attorneys fear putting their client’s interests into a system where they cannot as easily protect them, and thus, they advise against (more…)

Many parents want to give an equal share of the family home or some other sentimental form of real property (actual land usually) to their surviving children in equal shares. As an estate-planning attorney, one often sees the strange problems created by such plans. In particular if there are an even number of children, this may create hardships as voting blocks of family members eventually have to resolve votes that are evenly split in court or at least face the hardship of that choice among their siblings.

Suppose, for example, that well-meaning parents leave the family home to four children who are well intentioned adult human beings who generally wish to treat each other fairly, as family members often endeavor to. The problem is that four children will usually have some important differences in age, lifestyle and financial needs. When four such people own property, they must all pay a fourth of the tax and of the general maintenance and upkeep of the property. Suppose one of the children is unsentimental about the family home and wants to sell the property to finance a business or vacation, and two of the other children want to keep the family home to gather for Christmas (or any other important holiday). The fourth child has a hard time deciding, but is also having financial difficulty paying their share of the taxes, maintenance and upkeep.

In order to keep the home and avoid going to court, the two children who wish to keep the home will have to pay the other children what their shares of the property are worth.

This can create definite hard feelings even if the children who wish to keep the property have the ability to pay the others for their interest in it. When family Christmas (or any other important holiday) comes around, the children who sold their share of the property will feel badly about using it for the celebration (more…)