Estate Planning

Do You Think Your Estate Plan Is in Order?

A lot of people assume the answer is yes, simply because they already work with an attorney and a CPA. That’s not always the case.

Plenty of people know their estate plan isn’t in order and tell themselves they’ll get to it when they have time. If that’s you, this is your sign to stop waiting.

Estate planning is too broad a topic to cover fully on one page. What follows are a few of the pieces that get missed most often in real plans, including life insurance, long-term care insurance, and charitable planning. Read through it, and reach out when you’re ready to build a complete plan that ties together your estate plan, your asset protection, and your broader financial plan.

5 Essential Estate Planning Tools

Millions of Americans don’t have their estate plan in order. Some assume a simple will counts as one. It doesn’t. If you have any real amount of wealth, especially with a spouse or children in the picture, you need each of the following:

Tool	Why You Want This
Will	Without it, the state decides who gets your assets at death, and the state decides who gets custody of your minor children.
Marital Trusts	Maximize estate tax exemptions, avoid costly probate (up to 4-10% of the entire estate), and protect certain assets from being counted against you for long-term care costs.
Irrevocable Life Insurance Trust (ILIT)	Life insurance proceeds pass to beneficiaries free of income tax and free of estate tax.
Durable Power of Attorney (DPA)	Legal powers let someone act on your behalf if you become incapacitated (pay bills, manage IRAs, sell stocks); medical powers let someone make healthcare decisions on your behalf.
Family Limited Partnership (FLP)	Helps protect assets from creditors and reduce gift and estate taxes when transferring assets to family members.

Family Limited Partnerships

It’s remarkable how few people who’d actually benefit from a Family Limited Partnership have one. An FLP isn’t your primary estate planning tool. That’s still your will and marital trusts. But done correctly, it can meaningfully supplement your plan and save your heirs millions in estate taxes. It’s also a genuine tool for protecting wealth from creditors: assets held in your own name are exposed to creditors, while assets held inside a properly structured FLP generally aren’t.

An estate of $1,000,000 or more likely makes you a candidate for an FLP purely for asset protection. Cross $10,000,000 (including life insurance proceeds not owned by an ILIT) and an FLP becomes worth exploring for both asset protection and estate planning together.

Advanced Estate Planning Tools

Larger estates often call for a few additional tools. This isn’t an exhaustive list, but it’ll get you familiar enough with the terminology to have a real conversation about your own plan.

Intentionally Defective Grantor Trust (IDGT). Like a GRAT below, an IDGT moves wealth to your heirs while avoiding estate taxes. It freezes the value of an appreciating asset for estate tax purposes, which matters a lot for a closely held business appreciating quickly. For affluent clients, an IDGT is a common way to shift wealth outside the estate, often paired with a discounted FLP or LLC structure to amplify the benefit. Past roughly $10 million, it’s usually worth exploring.

Freeze Partnerships. Not well known, but genuinely one of the more useful tools available. A freeze partnership chases the same goal as a GRAT with more flexibility: shifting the appreciation on a fast-growing asset, stock or real estate, to the next generation without gift or estate tax. It can also meaningfully increase the discount available on a limited partnership. Done correctly, that total discount can reach as high as 90%, which is significant when the goal is moving millions out of an estate in a short window.

Grantor Retained Annuity Trust (GRAT). An irrevocable trust where you gift money into the GRAT but keep the right to receive an annuity payment for a set period. It leans on discounts in the asset’s value along with several other moving parts. Used well, it’s a legitimate way to shift a fast-appreciating asset out of an estate at a discount, though the structure itself is genuinely complex.

Qualified Personal Residence Trust (QPRT). Another freeze technique. A parent moves a personal residence into a QPRT for the benefit of the children, while keeping the right to live there for a set number of years. This lets the parent substantially discount the value of the gift to their children and removes all appreciation on that residence, from the date of the gift forward, from their own estate.

Information provided is not intended as tax or legal advice and should not be relied on as such. You are encouraged to seek tax or legal advice from an independent professional.

Charitable Planning

Charitable giving can be a genuinely effective estate planning tool, and it doesn’t have to be purely about the charity. Done well, it can raise your discretionary income, reduce or eliminate income tax, capital gains tax, and estate tax, leave your heirs a tax-free inheritance, and build a lasting family and social legacy. See the Tax Planning page for how a Charitable Gift Annuity brings all of that together.

What Actually Happens Without a Plan

Die without a will and state law decides who inherits what, not your own wishes. That process is called intestate succession, and it runs on a fixed formula with no regard for your actual relationships or intentions. A blended family, an estranged relative, a close friend who was never legally family, a charity you cared about: none of that gets accounted for. That same formula also decides who takes custody of minor children if both parents are gone, which alone is reason enough for any parent to have at least a basic will.

Even with a will, an estate without powers of attorney or a living trust in place typically still has to go through probate, a public, court-supervised process for validating the will and distributing assets. Probate takes time, often many months, sometimes longer, costs real money (a meaningful percentage of the estate, paid out to attorneys and court fees), and becomes public record, meaning anyone can look up what you owned and who got it. A properly structured trust is one of the primary tools for avoiding probate entirely.

How Often Should an Estate Plan Be Reviewed?

An estate plan isn’t something you sign once and forget. I recommend revisiting it after any major life event: a marriage, a divorce, a birth, a death in the family, a significant change in net worth, or a move to a different state, since estate law varies meaningfully by state. Even without a major life event, a review every few years is worth doing on its own, simply because tax law changes, and a plan built around rules from a decade ago may not be structured the best way anymore.