Estate Planning & Settlement

Estate Planning & Settlement

Estate planning is used for more than transferring of assets when you’re gone. Planning can take into account your taxes, your beneficiaries, your assets, your business, and the people who depend on you, all while you’re still around to make the decisions.

Estate planning tools can help shield your wealth from lawsuits, creditors, and high taxes during your lifetime while providing a system for an orderly transfer to your family later.

At Essex LLC, estate planning is part of our broader Planning-Based Money Management™ approach. We help you understand where your estate stands today, identify what could be missing, and build a clearer plan before you sit down with an attorney to make it official.

For over 30 years Essex LLC has helped clients work through Estate Planning and Settlement, assisting clients with questions and actions that might have been delayed and can be more costly if ignored.

Where Estate Planning Starts

The Questions Most People Haven’t Fully Answered

People may think they’ve handled estate planning because they set up documents years ago. At Essex we recommend that estate documents are reviewed periodically to make sure they have kept up with regulatory changes and still represent a person’s current situation and plans.

In practice, those documents should be reviewed periodically to make sure they have kept up with regulatory changes and still represent their current situation and future wishes.

We start with the following:

• Do you have a will, and is it current?
• Are the beneficiaries on your accounts up to date?
• Do you have a trust, does it still fit your situation, and is it funded?
• Does your estate face estate tax exposure?
• What asset protection is already in place, and what’s missing?

These questions sound simple, but the answers may reveal gaps that should be addressed.

Where We Add the Most Value

Beyond the Basics

Once the fundamentals are covered, estate planning starts to intersect with decisions that could be inaccurate without the full picture.

We help clients work through:

• The right timing to trigger a pension or retirement benefit
• Reviewing existing life insurance policies against current needs
• Stock options and RSUs, and how they factor into an estate
• Business succession planning
• Estate Settlement and Transfer

These are the decisions that can be made easier when working with an advisor who already knows your full financial picture.

Turning the Plan into Documents (and the documents into a plan)

Where Our Role Ends and Your Attorney Begins

Essex advisors are not attorneys, and we don’t draft wills, trusts, or other legal documents.

What we do is get you to that conversation prepared. By the time you sit down with an attorney, you’ll know what you need, why you need it, and how it fits into the rest of your financial plan.

Where Estate Planning Ends

How We Help When it’s Time to Settle or Manage an Estate

When the time comes, estate settlement may be overwhelming for some. Even with a solid estate plan and up-to-date documents, there can be lot to do. The paperwork usually starts within weeks of a loss. Care should be taken with decisions made in the first year as they can carry tax and financial consequences that may be difficult to undo later. Most of the work is administrative, and some actions steps may not be obvious if you haven’t done it before.

We start with the following:

• Determining how each asset transfers, whether by beneficiary designation, through a trust, or through probate.
• Sorting out the tax picture, including date-of-death values, updated cost basis, and what the beneficiaries are inheriting
• Getting accounts retitled and inherited IRAs set up correctly, on the timeline the rules require.
• Keeping the family’s cash flow intact while the estate is being settled, so a surviving spouse can continue to support themselves and their family.
• Coordination with the attorney, the CPA, and the administrator, executor or trustee, to help make the settlement process less chaotic and stressful. With the right team approach, resolution may be achieved sooner and more efficiently.

The executor or trustee carries the legal responsibility, and the attorney handles the filings and probate, if required. Our role is the financial side; we already know the accounts, the titling, and the history, so the family isn’t reconstructing a financial picture from a filing cabinet during a highly emotional period.

When the Estate Needs to Continue

Should the estate or trust need to continue after the creator’s death, such as continuing a trust for a surviving spouse, minor children, or beneficiaries with special needs, we assist the successor trustee with ongoing administration which includes asset management, income distribution, tax preparation support and overall record keeping.

As a fiduciary, every recommendation we make along the way is based on your best interest.

Not sure where your estate plan stands or in need of help with an estate settlement? Book a consultation with an Essex financial advisor.