Using Your Estate Plan to Encoarage Your Values in Your Heirs

Estate Planning and Your Values

The role of an estate planning attorney is more than just creating a set of documents that arranges for the orderly transfer of assets from you to your heirs.  A good estate planning attorney will challenge their clients to think about how they can best benefit their heirs with their estate plan.  The Law Offices of Brian Chew creates an estate plan that focuses not only on “who gets what” but how your heirs gain access to your estate and under what circumstances.

Thus if you want to use your estate to encourage your children or grand children to go to college, then we can set up an education trust that will provide funds to them for the purposes of higher education.  If you are worried about your children being mature enough to manage their inheritance, you can set up a credit shelter trust to protect their inheritance from themselves, judgments, creditors and divorces.  Such a trust can also be set up to encourage your children to be productive with their lives.  If you have children from previous marriages, you will most likely want to create an estate plan that ensures that they will be taken care of in addition to your current spouse if you should pass on.

The challenge of creating a good estate plan is trying to plan for potential problems such as

·         Children with special needs

·         Substance abuse

·         Bankruptcies

While the likelihood of these problems may be low, we create an estate plan that makes provisions if these problems were to arise.  At your free consultation, we will discuss what values are important to you and how we can use your estate plan to encourage those values in your heirs.