Estate Planning Advice for Grandparents
By Barry Zimmer on November 14th, 2017 in Estate Planning
Estate planning lawyers at Zimmer Law Firm provide advice with the creation of an estate plan that is right for your particular family situation. We help people of all ages and we understand how your life circumstances change as you get older. While it is vital for young parents and other younger people to make an estate plan, estate planning is often something that people tend to think grows in importance as you get older. As you begin to age, the likelihood you will experience an incapacitating injury or the likelihood you will pass away increase, so if you don’t already have an estate plan in place, it becomes vital to create one.
Zimmer Law Firm helps seniors to make a plan that addresses end-of-life issues and that helps to protect a legacy. This can be especially important for grandparents who want to provide a gift for grandchildren or who want to pass a family business on to the next generation. If you are a grandparent and you want assistance creating a plan to provide for your grandchildren, give us a call today.
Estate Planning Advice for Grandparents
For many grandparents, decisions need to be made about how an inheritance will be provided to children and grandchildren. You’ll need to assess how you want to divide up the assets you plan to leave for your loved ones and also make sure that you use the right techniques to be able to transfer assets in the most effective and efficient way.
If you have made the choice to leave money to grandchildren, you may want to take more control over what happens to an inheritance than you would be able to do if you just dictated in your will how the assets should transfer.
You may want to name who will act as guardian for the funds until your grandchildren are adults and able to manage the money and property on their own. It’s important for someone to be put in charge of managing the money if your grandchildren are underage, since children under 18 cannot inherit directly and the court may have to appoint a guardian for their inheritance if it is left to them in a will. You may also want to specify whether the money should be used for a particular purpose, such as indicating the money needs to be used to pay for your grandchild’s education or specifying that you don’t want the money transferred to your grandchild until he or she reaches aged 21.
Tools like a trust can allow you to take this additional control, as you can create a trust document that puts a responsible person in charge of managing your grandchild’s inheritance and that establishes conditions or limitations on the transfer of trust assets.
If you are leaving money to grandchildren and you have a larger estate, you also need to determine if estate tax will result in your estate having to pay a big tax bill. If your estate owes taxes, this could significantly reduce the amount of money that your grandchildren actually receive in their inheritance. There are techniques that you can make use of to reduce or avoid estate tax, but you need to talk with an experienced attorney early on in the estate planning process to determine how best to facilitate the tax-free transfer of wealth.
You cannot just use a living trust and assume that because the assets in the trust transfer outside of probate, estate tax won’t be assessed. Taxes can be due on both money transferred through a will as well as money transferred by the trust administration process.
Getting Help from Estate Planning Lawyers
Estate planning lawyers at Zimmer Law Firm will work closely with you to make an appropriate estate plan for your family and life situation. Whether you are a grandparent, have just married or had a baby, or are in any stage of life and you want to protect your loved ones and secure your autonomy in case of a serious medical event, we can help you.
To learn more about the services that an estate planning lawyer at our firm can offer, join us for a free seminar. If you are ready to create your personalized estate plan to control your legacy, give us a call at 513.721.1513 today.