Kansas Estate Planning Lawyer Says Estate Planning Reaches Far Beyond Finances
Your life and work are valuable treasures, even more valuable than your assets. Your assets are tools that you have available to you, which enable you to live and work how you like. When you think about that, it makes sense that you approach estate planning as being about much more than your money and your stuff. Estate planning is a means to protect what you have created and built during this lifetime so that it can continue to serve your loved ones and others long after you pass away. Estate planning involves the entire legacy you wish to leave – making an estate plan is a work of heart.
Your Kansas estate planning attorney can aid you in drafting all of the documents that you’ll need to plan for your legacy. What’s more, they can help you consider how you can best accomplish the things you want to do. For example, you may plan to transfer the ownership and operation of a family business to your children or transfer the ownership of your family’s vacation property to the people that are going to enjoy it in the years to come. Perhaps you have plans to send your antique collection to a museum or create a charitable organization that can serve others in ways that are meaningful to you.
The best legacy-focused estate plans involve not only an estate planning attorney but also the family members who will be involved in the various aspects of your plan. This includes any children whom you have spoken with about taking responsibility for your finances and health care as you grow older. It also includes family members who will own and operate your family’s business. You’ll also want to bring individuals who you have selected to manage charitable organizations, collections of items, or other pieces of your legacy into the conversation. This type of forward-looking approach builds relationships between you and the people who will carry on your legacy. Those bonds can give them a strong sense of why they’ll be doing what they get to do under your estate plan and a desire to do those things as you would like them done out of their commitment to you.
Once the initial work of planning your legacy and estate is complete, you must review it periodically and update it as needed. Revisions may be necessary in response to circumstances that you could not have predicted when you made your initial plan. Perhaps the brother who was going to serve as the president of your family business has become ill and will be unable to serve in that capacity in the future. You can revise your business succession plan and name another person as company president. Perhaps you received additional pieces of art as a gift, and your collection has grown to the point where you would like for it to eventually reside in a museum where the public can enjoy it. You can add provisions for that to your estate plan, too.
Whatever your hopes for your legacy are, your Wichita estate planning attorney, J. Joseph Weber is here to assist you in constructing an estate plan that can make them happen. Call us to make your appointment today or contact us online.