San Jose Advanced Estate Planning Attorneys

Advising Clients Who Wish to Preserve Their Wealth

If you’ve worked hard for years to ensure your family has financial stability, you don’t want to lose a significant portion of your wealth to estate taxes when you pass away. Depending on the value of your estate, this is a very real possibility unless you think ahead to protect your assets through advanced estate planning.

Fortunately, the experienced estate planning attorneys at Trust Law Legacy Group, APC, can sit down with you and develop a strategy to minimize your estate’s losses when it’s time to transfer your wealth to your loved ones. Our trusted legal team is skilled at various asset protection tactics and would be happy to discuss them with you while preparing your estate plan. Contact us to schedule a free consultation at our San Jose law office.

What Is Advanced Estate Planning?

If you own any assets and have family members you’d like to financially protect when you’re gone, you should create an estate plan with the help of a San Jose attorney. After all, estate planning is a process that specifies which loved ones should get your assets when you pass away and how you want your personal affairs to be handled after your death.

The goals of estate planning can include preserving wealth, avoiding probate, reducing taxes, protecting assets, and ensuring proper asset distribution. Making estate plans ahead of time can streamline the process of dealing with the assets and debts within your estate so your family doesn’t have to make difficult decisions when you’re gone. Most estate plans use tools that include trusts, wills, insurance policies, charitable donations, advance health care directives, and durable powers of attorney. In short, most adults can benefit from having an estate plan in place.

However, some people need more than a basic estate plan to properly protect their wealth. In particular, high-net-worth individuals need advanced estate planning tactics to avoid losing a large portion of their value to estate taxes. For this reason, advanced estate planning focuses on legal and financial strategies to maximize assets and reduce the tax implications when transferring valuable assets to heirs. So, if you’re particularly worried about your beneficiaries losing much of your hard-earned money due to taxes, contact a San Jose estate planning attorney to learn more about some advanced strategies for high-value estates.

Who Should Consider Advanced Estate Planning?

While just about every adult should have an estate plan to protect their family’s financial future, some people need an advanced plan that focuses on reducing the taxes paid by their estate when they pass away. In general, high-net-worth individuals with significant assets need this type of plan. However, those with complicated family situations, like blended families or special needs dependents, can also benefit from it.

More specifically, you should talk to a San Jose estate planning attorney about an advanced estate plan if any of the following are true for you:

You’re a single person with a net worth of over $5.5 million
You’re married and have a net worth of over $11 million
You own a small or medium-sized business
You want to leave most of your assets to charity
You’re divorced and have children from that relationship
You have health problems that are expected to get worse over time
Your business makes you a likely target of lawsuits
You have one or more beneficiaries with special needs
You expect to receive a large inheritance from a family member
Your retirement accounts have more than $200,000 in them
You have a generous life insurance policy
You want to leave a large sum of money to your children or grandchildren

If one or more of these apply to you, you should contact our San Jose estate planning law firm to discuss your legal options with helpful estate lawyers. We can review your financial situation to determine which estate planning documents would benefit you so you have the peace of mind you deserve when considering your family’s future. Call us today for a free consultation with our caring California legal team.

What Advanced Estate Planning Strategies Are Available?

Skilled attorneys should be aware of numerous asset preservation strategies that may be right for their clients, depending on their estate planning goals. When you sit down with your attorney to discuss your options, you’ll learn the advantages of each one and will have the chance to ask questions to ensure you understand how it works.

While the ultimate objective of advanced estate planning tactics is typically to reduce your tax liabilities, many of them also fulfill additional needs, such as protecting certain assets and ensuring your loved ones have the resources they need long-term.

Some of the most common estate planning options include the following:

Trusts, which hold and distribute assets based on set terms that you’ve agreed to
Wills, which outline how your assets should be distributed after your death
Life insurance, which provides funds for taxes and equalizing inheritances
Family limited partnerships (FLP), which transfer assets to your family while allowing you to maintain control of them during your lifetime
Business succession planning

As your attorneys provide guidance on the estate planning documents that will benefit you and your family, you might notice that different types of irrevocable and revocable living trusts are among the most common legal options. Trusts are legal arrangements that can safeguard the assets you transfer to them, streamlining the process of transferring ownership of trust assets to your beneficiaries and letting them avoid probate. The following are some of the types of trusts you can create for your California estate plan:

Qualified Personal Residence Trusts (QPRT), which let you transfer your home into the trust for your beneficiary while still living in it for a specified period of time
Generation Skipping Trusts, which lets you bypass your children and leave money to your grandchildren while minimizing estate tax liability
Grantor Retained Annuity Trusts, which are irrevocable trusts that let you receive fixed annuity payments and minimize your beneficiary’s gift tax liability after transferring your assets
Special needs trusts, which let you transfer assets to a beneficiary with special needs without pushing their net worth over the limits in place for government programs
Charitable trusts, meant to reduce your estate’s tax liability while supporting your chosen causes

If you want to add any of these to your estate plan, contact our San Jose law firm. We’re eager to provide more information about the legal documents that can help reduce your estate’s tax liability and financially protect your family.

Why Should You Call San Jose Advanced Estate Planning Attorneys?

If you’re ready to begin planning for your future, it’s time to reach out to Trust Law Legacy Group, APC. We’ve been serving clients across Santa Clara County for years, assisting with everything from special needs planning for parents to business succession planning for business owners. So, we’re happy to provide guidance with creating a revocable living trust, appointing a durable power of attorney, choosing a successor trustee, creating a charitable trust, and more.

We understand estate planning can be intimidating to get started on, especially if you’re not sure which legal options are available to you and your family. That’s why we want you to know we’re here to answer questions about estate planning, taxation law, the probate process, and other complex topics you might consider as you plan your estate. If you want to talk to a skilled attorney, call us today at 669-201-4368 for a free consultation with our team.