What Makes Us Different
Explaining to you how we’re different requires an explanation of what the “traditional” experience with a lawyer is like. If you’ve worked with a lawyer to prepare estate planning documents for you in the past, this will sound familiar.
During the traditional experience, you’ll go in and meet with a lawyer who will often make things seem very complicated and confusing. You’ll have a good idea that the lawyer is smart and seems to know what they are doing, so you’ll nod and answer questions, as if you understand everything. Because you want to do the right thing for your family, you’ll have the lawyer prepare document for you and you’ll sign the documents, feeling relieved that you’ve got that taken care of.
You’ll take your fancy planning binder home, stick it on a shelf or in a drawer, mark estate planning off on your checklist as DONE and never think about it again.
You might remember your lawyer said something about moving your bank accounts into the trust. So you’ll go to the bank, forget what you were supposed to do, call your lawyer’s office, get a voicemail, have to leave the bank and wait for a call back, (which takes several hours at least and sometimes days) and by that time, you’ll have gotten busy with other things and never get around to moving that bank account.
A few weeks later, you’ll get a bill in the mail for $67.50 for 15 minutes of your lawyer’s time for answering a couple of questions. You’ll make a mental note – don’t call lawyer ever again.
Several years later, you’ll refinance your house or sell it and buy a new one and forget that you were supposed to let your lawyer know or make sure you kept the title in the name of the trust. Your children will get older, making your guardianship choices outdated, but you don’t want to call your lawyer because you know you’ll get a bill in the mail two weeks later.
You’ll hear something about a change in the tax law, but you figure you’d surely get a letter in the mail from your lawyer if it was something that affected you, so you don’t worry about it. And, you’d have to dig through boxes to find your trust documents so you could remember your lawyer’s name and find their contact information. Who has time for that?
It’s not until you become incapacitated or die and your family finds the binder you stuck up on a shelf several years before and never looked at again, that they’ll realize your plan is so outdated that it has nothing to do with your life, your assets and the law.
Your family is at a loss. They don’t know where to turn or what to do, so they contact the same lawyer you used to prepare the documents, who is as happy as can be to probate your assets, which never made it into the trust.
What makes our firm different is that we are here not just to create a set of documents you will likely never update or look at again, we are here to ensure your loved ones have someone to turn to when you are no longer here. And, to support you in planning for not just legacy (what you leave behind when you are gone), but for life as well.
We’ve been told by many of our clients that the experience of considering their own death before and during their Planning Session, in the way we take you through the experience, offers a deeper and better experience of life afterwards.
We understand you are BUSY; you are growing, you desire a life of prosperity and you value ease, convenience and efficiency. You want to know you’ve made the best decisions for your family during your lifetime and that your family will be left with ease and aware of your love by how well you prepared.
You want to make sure your children would be taken care of in the best way possible and will be properly prepared to receive your wealth, when it is time.
That’s our focus too. We’ve developed unique systems to give you the same access to a Family Lawyer as was previously only available to the likes of Bill Gates, Warren Buffet, and Sam Walton so you can have the guidance you need to build and maintain a life of prosperity and leave a legacy of Family Wealth.
Family Wealth is so much more than financial wealth. It really encompasses everything you care about even more than money, your values, insights, stories, experience — your intellectual, spiritual and human assets.
As part of our Planning process, we guide you to consider and plan for those most often lost assets. It’s baked in.
We encourage communication with our clients. In fact, we’ve thrown out the time clocks so you never have to be afraid to call with a quick question (or even a not so quick question). Everything we do is billed on a flat-fee basis, agreed to in advance, so there are never any surprises.
We have a team to serve you. When you call our office to ask your quick question, you won’t have to wait hours or days for a phone call back. You’ll get your question answered, right away. And, if you need to schedule a more in-depth legal or strategic call with us, a call will be scheduled when we’re both available and ready for the call so we can make the very best use of your time and not waste your time by leaving voicemail after voicemail back and forth.
And, we ensure the most important details of your planning are followed through on and help you make sure your plan continues to work throughout your lifetime.
We’ve created unique membership programs to keep your plan up to date year in and year out as well as give you access to our Trusted Team of Legal Experts for guidance on legal or financial matters. One day you will need a lawyer. I don’t know why and I don’t know when, but when you do, you will be grateful you can call on us and we’ll be here to advise you, help you find the right counsel, or get you out of a jam.
And, as I mentioned, we believe your financial wealth is only about a quarter of your overall “Family Wealth” which is made up of your far more valuable, Intellectual, Spiritual and Human assets – who you are and what’s important to you.
Most lawyers only focus on transferring your financial wealth to the next generation; we focus on identifying and building your Family Wealth during your lifetime and leaving a legacy of love that goes far beyond money, after you are gone.
We’ve developed a tool that allows us to pass on your whole Family Wealth, including your Intellectual, Spiritual and Human assets. I can’t go into the details here, but we’ll definitely talk about when you come into meet with with us.
We look forward to seeing you and caring for your family soon!
KIDS PLANNING
It dawned on me one night when I was out to dinner with my partner and I realized that our son was at home with a teenage babysitter. And while I named legal guardians for my son, those legal guardians were outside the country. And I thought to myself, "What's really going to happen if something happens to us tonight and we don't make it home?"
Well, I imagined the police knocking at our door finding our teenage babysitter there with our young son and the police having no choice but to take our son into the care of protective services until they could figure out what to do. They'd have to try and locate my will. And who even knew where that was?
And then they'd have to locate my family. And I haven't really left any clear directions about how to do that. I'd left our mobile phone numbers but, of course, if something happened to us those wouldn’t be working. And I realized that no estate planning attorney that I had ever met or spoken to had ever talked to me about what would happen to my children not just for the long-term but for the short-term. And out of that was born a new practice area — entirely new practice area — around Kids Protection Planning.
In my family if something were to happen to me two people would come forward to claim custody of my kids — my older brother and my younger sister. On paper my brother looks great. He's already had children; he has a stable job and he's in a relationship. And my sister on the other hand, she doesn’t look so great on paper. She travels a lot, she goes to festivals, she's never had her own children and she's got a few different jobs over her lifetime. So, if I just put the two them in front of you with no other information and you are the judge making the decision about who to choose, my older brother with the kids and the stable job and the apparently stable life or my young footloose and free-spirited sister who's never even had children and hasn’t yet gotten into her career. Who would you choose?
Of course, you would choose my brother but what you wouldn’t know is that my brother is in fact the last person I would ever want to raise my kids. In fact, he's the one that I confidentially excluded from the process of raising my children in my Kids Protection Planning for a number of reasons that I won't share here. But nobody would know these things unless they knew her very intimately.
CHILDREN WITH SPECIAL NEEDS PLANNING
A lot of lawyers are just putting in place standard document such as special needs trust or a supplemental needs trust to ensure that the child will still get governmental benefits after their parents are gone. But what we chose to do is to build something more personal into these plans. For example, one of our clients would take her son out to dinner twice a week and to the movies at least once a week, more often to the park. And she really wants to make sure that he was getting out.
And so, we built incentive provisions into their plan to provide that if the person named as his guardian takes the child to the movies X number of times per week and to dinner X number of times per week and to the park X number of times per week and to these other enrichment activities with him, that the guardian would be compensated for that. That gave our clients such peace of mind to know that they spelled out their wishes that their child will continue to be enriched after they're gone not just received governmental benefits.
“In fact, one of our lawyers always includes provisions in her trusts that allow for the creation of a special needs trust in future generations if necessary, called a standby special needs trust because that may be needed down the line even though it's not now.
WEALTH CREATION TRUST
A example of what a Wealth Creation Trust can do:
Imagine you have a 16-year-old daughter, and we established a wealth creation trust for her birthday so that any gift that she gets of any size — let's say for her 18th birthday, sweet 16, high school graduation — those gifts that she's not going to use right away will go into her wealth creation trust.
Now, let's say that by the time she graduates college or high school she's got $20,000 in this trust. She can use that $20,000 to start a business. And if that business grows into $1 million, $5 million, $10 million, it's protected from lawsuits, creditors, divorce, bankruptcy and even from estate taxes. And if you set this up right it can even be protected in the event of financial aid. So, setting up and understanding these trusts is really important.
FAMILY WEALTH PASSAGES
We build it into all of our planning. When I did this process for my own children, I got it completely. I felt wow. I just thought about and documented things that I haven't ever really consciously considered before. I kind of always had them in the back of my mind. things I really wanted to make sure that my kids knew if anything happened to me and as they were being raised but I've never spoken of them before, and I certainly hadn't documented it.
So doing that through the Family Wealth Passages process was an entirely different thing. And if left to their own devices, most parents and business owners who are way too busy simply won't do it. I think it's a great idea but they're not going to get it done. But since we build this into your process, it shifts everything. You begin to see the value of you holding them to account on that.
In every plan that we do, we include a process after we've got all your financial documents in place that is going to ensure that you pass on what really matters, and the financial documents are going to pass on your money, make things as easy as possible for your loved ones, keep them out of court and out of conflict, and then at the very end, we're going to interview you, asking you a series of questions. We call these family wealth passages. We record this conversation with you, and we put these questions and your answers on a Flash Drive so your family has a lasting legacy of who you are, what's important to you, and what really matters. We just build that into our process. There won't be any extra fees for it.
It's just part of what we do, because we know it’s really the most important part of the planning that you'll do with us. This planning process is not about you, and it's not about us. It's about the people we love the most, and we know that's why you're here today. It's to plan for the people that you love the most, and to keep them out of conflict and out of court.
BLENDED FAMILIES
it is very likely that there will be conflict after the death of the parent because his or her assets will typically go to the surviving spouse, oftentimes completely cutting out the children from the prior marriage. it is very important for blended families to make sure a proper estate plan is in place before his/her death.