Estate Planning and Administration

Optimizing Wealth Transfer: A Guide for Substantial Estates

In navigating substantial wealth, individuals encounter a crucial challenge: crafting a strategic framework for seamless wealth succession to ensure that their hard-earned assets smoothly transition to chosen heirs, minimizing the risk of substantial government deductions through estate and inheritance taxes.

Crafting a strategic plan is paramount for individuals and businesses with considerable assets. It paves the way for a seamless transfer, evading the potential loss of over 50% to government levies. Our trust and estates department, chaired by David A. Cannon, has true depth of experience and is uniquely situated to assist you in protecting and preserving your hard-earned assets and transferring them in accordance with your wishes. Working closely with you to ascertain your anticipations and desires, our team draws on its deep knowledge of all pertinent tax, trusts and estates property, securities, business organization, banking, and real estate laws to identify those techniques and structures which are legally available and best suited to preserving your estate to the maximum extent possible. Asset reallocation; personal inter-vivos trusts; insurance trusts; carefully crafted wills; proper insurance planning; the establishment of trusts for children; the establishment of 401(k), Keogh and defined benefit retirement plans; the formation of charitable trusts and foundations – some or all of these may prove vital to preserve your accumulated wealth and guard it to the maximum extent possible from taxation.

Our legal team’s ability to protect your assets does not stop with planning. It extends to serving as counsel to your executor and/or your trustee; if you wish, serving as your executor and/or trustee; furnishing counsel as needed to take advantage of the constantly changing and complex bodies of tax, trusts and estates property, real estate and securities laws; and, representing clients and their estates before surrogate courts, tax tribunals and any other forum which must be accessed to fulfill your estate plan and carry out your desires.

Strategic Wealth Succession

Choosing someone to make decisions about your healthcare in the event you cannot make those decisions for yourself is equally important. Health care proxies, health care directives and declarations, and durable powers of attorney are standard parts of a planning process.

We sincerely understand the extraordinarily sensitive nature of the decisions and activities you must engage in to preserve your wealth. Tact, compassion and gentleness are the hallmarks of our approach in this area. While not for a second forgetting that our job is to have the documents and structures we create speak strongly and emphatically on your behalf when you may no longer speak for yourself.

We work closely with small businesses to address succession planning issues and comprehensive estate planning for the principals of those businesses. Buy-sell agreements; insurance advice; appraisal protocols; comprehensive retirement planning – all are the subjects of our attorneys’ careful attention.

Keeping your estate planning fees modest is the first step of preserving your estate for your heirs. And as with all other practice areas at IFG, our estate planning activities are geared to furnish comprehensive and optimal counsel for fees which are reasonable. Impeccable client service is the order of the day, every day.