LifePlanning Legal Services™
Austin TX Estate Planning
Estate planning is not an event; it is a lifelong process. Ongoing maintenance is vital to the success of any estate plan. Clients prefer to plan with the living trust rather than a Will because it is marked by flexibility. They want their planning to adjust to meet their changing needs. For these reasons, we have developed the LifePlanning Legal Services™ program, a structured maintenance strategy that will help ensure that your planning works over the long haul.
LifePlanning includes a number of elements, all intended to accomplish the goal of more successful, cost-effective planning:
- To counsel clients annually on planning opportunities provided by changes in the law, their family, and financial circumstances;
- To regularly update documents to incorporate improved language and planning strategies;
- To help fund our clients trusts correctly and completely;
- To give successor trustees the tools and information they need to carry out their roles;
We believe that part of improving estate planning quality means creating a team approach. The team consists of you (the expert on your family), the attorney – us – (the expert on the law), and your financial advisors, CPA, and insurance professional (the experts on financial matters). Under this strategy, planning becomes proactive, the estate plan does what it’s supposed to do, and the overall cost is less than the national average for trust settlement or probate alone.
Like you, we are concerned about the legal fees associated with estate planning. We want to help reduce the total overall cost of your planning while improving its quality. There are really three types of costs involved in this process:
- The cost of the initial counseling (if any is given) and the documents
- The cost of updating the plan (or failing to do so, which is more expensive)
- The cost of settling the estate after disability or death
