Vital Actions You Must Take to Protect Your Wealth and Safeguard Your Family’s Financial Future During this Global Pandemic

The raging global pandemic is placing a serious strain on our Nation’s health and financial systems as those systems try to cope with the myriad fear-driven reactions of an insecure public.

In the current environment, we encourage our clients to calmly consider, but aggressively undertake, the following Action Steps to update and improve their personal estate and asset preservation plans:

1) Review and revise your Will and other testamentary documents (lifetime trusts, powers of attorney, etc.), including the appointment of successor trustees and attorneys-in-fact.

2) Check the provisions of your living will/health care proxy to ensure that your instructions for the providing (or withholding) of life sustaining measures are appropriate and legally enforceable.

3) Consider and update your appointment of “stand-by” and testamentary guardians for your minor children, who will need the personal and financial guidance that you would want them to have in your absence.

4) Verify and, if needed, change the title (individual, joint, or “in trust for”) and signatory rights of designees with respect to bank accounts, certificates of deposit, lines of credit and similar financial accounts. Check and update your designees’ access to bank safe deposit boxes upon death or disability.

5) Verify the ownership and beneficiary designations for your life insurance, and consider the advisability of making changes for estate and wealth preservation purposes.

6) Check the tax and beneficiary status of your various retirement accounts, and evaluate the potential effect of the restrictions now imposed by the new “SECURE” Act on planning for inherited IRAs and other retirement assets.

7) Review how your home and other assets are held in the event that qualification for Medicaid assistance is deemed necessary in the future.

8) Explore available income tax planning strategies (including those made possible under the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act).

9) Consider and implement appropriate estate and trust planning techniques, including appropriate asset protection strategies for these uncertain times, that will achieve tax and non-tax objectives for preserving assets for your spouse, children and future generations.

10) Create a financial “family mission statement” that would properly coordinate with your estate and wealth preservation plans, setting out your desires, hopes, directions and expectations for your loved ones.

To implement any or all of these Action Steps you should contact us by phone or email, and we will respond promptly to guide you in moving ahead on these and other very timely (and time-sensitive) concerns. Our experienced lawyers and tax professionals are ready to assist you with identifying and mapping out the proper steps that you need to take, and putting them into effect before a life-changing event should occur.