Estate planning is the process of arranging for the orderly management and disposition of your assets while living and upon death.  In doing so, the focus is to minimize taxes, protect assets and assure that your assets pass to your recipient.

Estate Planning consists of any one or more of the subject matters set forth below.  Our attorneys are skilled in dealing whichever of the following subject matters interests you.  All of the following subjects apply no matter how small or large your assets are.

• Power of Attorney:  To assure that your assets are protected while living and to assure that your financial affairs are properly handled while living in circumstances when you are unable to manage your financial affairs because of illness or other causes.

• Living Trusts:  To provide a method to avoid probate if you wish and also to provide a vehicle for managing your assets during your lifetime.

• Wills:  To formalize the manner in which your assets will be distributed upon death.

• Tax Planning:  To assure that your assets pass, upon death, in a manner that will minimize estate and inheritance taxes.

• Other Trusts:  To provide for a method to achieve any one of the following objectives, and more, namely, to save income and death taxes, to protect assets from creditors, to be able to control the use and disposition of your assets for an indefinite period of time following your death, protecting your children's inheritances from being recklessly spent or from devious family members.

• Asset Protection:  To protect your assets and the inheritances of your heirs from claims of creditors.

• Gift Planning:  To intelligently plan gifts so as to minimize income, gift and/or death taxes and to assure that the gifts are utilized by the recipient in the intended fashion.

• Charitable Giving:  To take advantage of the many different methods of making charitable gifts, both during lifetime and upon death, so as to obtain the maximum tax benefit of such gifts and to control, if you wish, the manner in which the charitable gift will be used.

• Life Insurance and Retirement Plan Proceeds:  To assure that life insurance and retirement plan proceeds pass to the intended heirs in the intended manner.  In many instances, the outright payment of large sums of insurance money or retirement plan money to an heir, such as someone young or disabled or someone who is a spendthrift or subject to an unstable marital relationship, may not be the most intelligent method of disposing of these funds.  In addition, improper disposition of insurance and retirement plan proceeds can lead to unnecessary income and death taxes.