Insights

Addressing the 5 Phases of a Well-Designed Estate Plan

July, 2023

Wealth transfer planning is an important aspect of your overall financial plan. After all, you’ve worked hard to build and protect your wealth. This important level of planning begins with you articulating thoughts you may have about how you’d like your wealth to transfer during your lifetime and after you’re gone.

We have created the Wealth Transfer Preparation Package that can help you work through the following phases of wealth transfer planning to ensure your current estate plan aligns with your intentions.

  • Phase One: Wealth Transfer Planning
  • Phase Two: Lifetime Planning
  • Phase Three: Legacy Planning
  • Phase Four: Communication Planning
  • Phase Five: Action Planning

We encourage you to read through the statements in each phase, give them some thought and talk about them with the people who are important in your life. Then start writing. This workbook is an exercise to help you bring into focus what’s important to you now and in the future.

Further, bring this to your next meeting and we will refer to your responses to assure your wealth transfer plan addresses your needs and wants. While CWA does not provide legal advice, nor do we prepare estate planning documents for clients, we believe that due to the intimacy of the relationship, the frequency of contact, and the knowledge of the ‘total picture,’ we are often best equipped to help our clients ensure that their estate planning objectives are appropriately addressed. In doing so, it is important to periodically reconfirm clients’ estate plan intentions, including transfers of wealth, guardianship, and other less formal wishes such as preserving digital assets, like pictures, videos, email accounts, etc. Those intentions should be evaluated against a client’s current estate plan, account structure and beneficiary designations, to ensure the current plan aligns with those intentions. We believe it is critical that clients understand that an estate plan is about more than just wealth transfer.

Please reach out to your CWA advisor if you have any questions or need help to get started.

 

Disclosures: For informational and educational purposes only and should not be construed as specific investment, accounting, legal, or tax advice. Certain information is based upon third party data which may become outdated or otherwise superseded without notice. Third party information is deemed to be reliable, but its accuracy and completeness cannot be guaranteed. Neither the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) nor any other federal or state agency have approved, determined the accuracy, or confirmed the adequacy of this article.