We know you love your children. A lot of our clients would like to leave their family legacy and their life-savings as inheritances to their beloved sons and daughters.
We often advise our clients to do even further: that is to leave more to your children, to leave something more, something better, and something even powerful than money as a gift to your children, and they will thank you more when the time comes than leaving only money to them.
Wondered what that mysterious gift can be?
The answer is to establish an "Asset Protection Trust" for your children, so that all the precious assets they have inherited from you will be protected by their estranged/divorced spouse and aggressive creditors chasing after them.
You gift them the money by giving it in a fully protected "Vault". Here is how it works:
1. Leave your estate to your children by creating a Revocable Living Trust, so that you can manage, access and benefit from the assets in your trust while you are alive. Upon death, assets in the Trust will to your children without Probate.
2. In your Living Trust documents, include provisions for the share of a child to be held in a protective trust after your death.
3. Trust Assets will be held in an Irrevocable Trust, with your children as beneficiaries, so that they can use the fund as needed for their daily maintenance and support.
4. By funding the assets into the Irrevocable Trust for your children upon death, the assets were protected, for as many generations as possible, and to be kept in your family's blood-line, from:
a. Their disability, inability, inexperience, or lack of initiative if they receive too much
too young.
b. Their own risk of loss to catastrophic events, e.g. car accidents or personal injury claims.
c. creditor claims, meaning lawsuits in our litigious society.
e. Predators in our society, such as divorcing spouses of your descendants, or spouses of your descendants who survive your descendants and remarry someone outside of your family.
f. Death taxes on all amounts that you can make tax-free when you die, for as many generations as you can keep the original amounts and any of their growth in value
free from death taxes. (Tax protection is merely a side benefit.)
A protective trust is a wonderful gift of love that you make to your descendants. It gives them more freedom than they would have if the assets went to them outright, because they have control without risk of loss to creditors and predators.
Want to give this wonderful gift to your loved ones, in addition to your family legacy?
Call us to get a free legal consultation about your family's estate planning needs.