Estate planning
We help your accounts, beneficiaries and estate documents reflect the same intentions, coordinating the financial details with your attorney and the people who matter to you.
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Connect the documents and accounts
Check accounts and beneficiaries
We review account ownership and beneficiary designations across your balance sheet, then compare them with your intentions and estate documents. The aim is to identify mismatches before your family has to resolve them.
Structure the estate for tax efficiency
We look at how each asset will be taxed as it passes. Appreciated assets may be worth holding for a step-up in basis, retirement accounts may go further left to charity or to heirs in lower tax brackets, and lifetime gifts, Roth conversions, portability and trusts are weighed against the federal estate tax exemption. Your attorney drafts the structure; we model its tax effect.
Coordinate with your attorney
We organize the financial picture for your estate attorney and follow through on funding and titling questions. Powers of attorney, healthcare directives and trust arrangements need to stay connected to the accounts they affect.
Prepare for gifts and inheritance
We consider inherited accounts, appreciated assets and charitable goals when evaluating how wealth may transfer. We also help organize account information and prepare family members, so the plan is easier to understand and carry out.
Common questions
Do you write wills or trusts?
No. We are not attorneys and we do not draft legal documents. We coordinate with your estate attorney, or help you find one, and make sure the financial reality matches what the documents say.
I set up a trust years ago. Is there anything to do?
Usually yes. The two things worth checking immediately are whether it was ever actually funded and whether your beneficiary designations still agree with it. Both are common failure points and both are fixable.
My kids will inherit my IRA. Does that still work the way it used to?
For most non-spouse beneficiaries, no. The lifetime stretch was replaced with a ten-year window, which can put taxable distributions into your children’s working years. That is worth planning around while you are alive.
Do account titles and beneficiary forms really matter that much?
Most people believe their will controls where their assets go. For a large share of a typical balance sheet, it does not.
Retirement accounts, life insurance, and anything with a named beneficiary pass by that designation, directly, regardless of what the will says. Jointly titled property and accounts with transfer-on-death instructions pass by titling. A will governs what is left over.
This is why a beneficiary form completed years ago, before a marriage, a divorce, or a death, can quietly undo an expensive estate plan, and why an ex-spouse still listed on an old 401(k) is one of the most common and most painful findings in this work.
So the first thing we do is unglamorous and valuable: audit every beneficiary designation and every account title across the entire balance sheet, compare them against what your documents actually say, and fix the mismatches.
The second most common finding is a trust that was drafted, signed, and never funded. An unfunded trust is an expensive document that controls nothing, because assets were never retitled into it. Following through on that is coordination work rather than legal work, and it is exactly the sort of thing that falls between an attorney who drafted the document and an advisor who assumed someone else handled it.
How do you work with my estate attorney?
We are not attorneys and we do not draft documents. What we do is make sure the financial side and the legal side are actually working from the same plan, translate what the documents mean in plain language, and bring your attorney a clear picture of the assets, the titling, and the tax situation so their drafting is informed.
The planning issues that come up most often are inherited retirement accounts, where the SECURE Act replaced the lifetime stretch with a ten-year window for most non-spouse beneficiaries, which turns inheritance into a tax-bracket problem for your children rather than a lifetime income stream.
Basis planning matters as well, since inherited property generally receives a basis tied to its fair market value at death under IRC section 1014, which may be higher or lower than the prior basis. Lifetime gifts generally carry the donor’s basis, subject to exceptions, and that difference alone should shape which assets are given away and which are held.
Florida residents have the additional advantage of no state estate tax and no state income tax, which changes the calculus compared with what clients often read online.
Beyond the tax mechanics there is the ordinary and important work: powers of attorney and healthcare directives that are current and accessible, lifetime gifting that reflects what you actually want rather than what a threshold suggests, charitable legacy structures where giving is a priority, and an organized inventory so the people who eventually handle this are not searching through drawers during the worst week of their lives.
What exactly is included?
- Beneficiary designation audit across every account
- Account titling and ownership review
- Trust strategy coordinated with your estate attorney
- Powers of attorney and healthcare directive coordination
- Lifetime gifting and legacy planning
- Inherited account and stretch-rule guidance
- Charitable legacy design
- Help using an online document platform for basic wills, powers of attorney and directives, where an attorney is not needed
- Estate and gift tax exposure projections
- Step-up in basis planning for appreciated assets
- Special needs planning: ABLE accounts and special needs trusts
- Family meetings and heir preparation
- Digital asset and account inventory