Legacy Wealth Planning in Charlotte - FAQs

You worked hard your whole life, and you are likely concerned about what will happen to your legacy after you are gone. Legacy wealth planning is a certain type of estate planning focused on managing your wealth while you are alive and distributing your assets after you pass away. The goal of legacy wealth planning is to ensure that you can pass on your legacy after you are gone. When our estate planning lawyers work with our clients to create a legacy wealth planning estate plan, we learn about their core values, community involvement, and goals for their legacy. We will discuss some of the most frequently asked questions regarding legacy wealth planning in Charlotte, North Carolina, below.

Legacy wealth planning is essentially estate planning focused on creating a legacy. It focuses on managing your wealth while alive and distributing your assets after death in accordance with a legacy plan. Your legacy will include making sure your family heirlooms, stories, personal effects, and accumulated wisdom will be passed down after your death. Estate planning should not merely focus on the distribution of your property, but on allowing you to create the type of legacy you desire.

Traditional estate planning is focused on the distribution of your property after you pass away, either through a will-based or trust-based estate plan. Traditional estate planning also protects your assets from certain creditors, lawsuits, and excessive taxes. Finally, traditional estate planning allows your beneficiaries to access your assets as easily as possible. All of these goals are extremely important and play a role in legacy estate planning, as well. However, legacy estate planning focuses on not only your financial legacy, but on your non-financial legacy, too. When you create a personal legacy plan, the plan will capture how to transfer your family values and traditions to future generations. In other words, a legacy wealth plan focuses on transferring all of your assets, including financial and non-financial assets.

Family wealth trusts protect your assets to provide wealth for several generations. These trusts are different from revocable living trusts, mostly created to avoid estate tax and probate. Instead, a family wealth trust provides you, your children, grandchildren, and so-on with lifetime benefits. The goal of creating a family wealth trust is to allow many generations to benefit from the assets in the trust. When you create a family wealth trust, you will need to appoint trustees who will manage the trust assets. The goal is to set up a trust that will continue to earn income over many generations. We recommend appointing people you trust to manage the trust well or hiring a company that offers trust management services.

You will need someone who can invest the principal assets in a trust wisely so that the trust is constantly making an income for future generations. When you create the trust, you will be able to set the terms for the agreement. Perhaps you want to restrict beneficiaries somehow, such as making them graduate from college or turn 21 before they receive any of the income generated by the trust. When you create a family wealth trust, you are in charge of setting the terms. We can help you create the trust to ensure that it will help future generations of your family succeed.

There are many different benefits that come with creating a family wealth trust, including the following:

• Provides you with the flexibility to create unique terms within the trust
• Safeguards your assets for your own children should your surviving spouse remarry
• Protects your children's inheritance
• Minimizes your estate taxes
• Defers the payment of a state taxes for your surviving spouse
• Avoids an expensive and time-consuming probate process
• Provides for the trust management or immediate transfer of assets to your beneficiaries after your death
• Allows others to control your assets effectively for you should you become incapacitated

Legacy estate planning is not merely for the wealthy. Instead, all families can benefit from setting up a family wealth trust. Family wealth trust provides significant benefits, including potential tax savings and the peace of mind of protecting your assets for your family’s benefit. If you are interested in creating a family wealth trust, we can help. Contact us today to schedule your initial consultation.