If you’re driving down the street and your gas light comes on, and you pull up to the next stoplight and the gas station on the left has gas for a dollar a gallon and the gas station on the right has gas for two dollars a gallon are you going to go to the gas station on the right? Or the one on the left where it’s cheaper? Of course you’re going to go to the one on the left. Why would you pay more if you don’t have to?
I think that really gets at the crucks of this weeks topic. So in our 7 Pillar Series we’re going to talk about legacy planning this week. And estate planning is not just who gets the money. It’s when, and it’s how. And those are the areas where we can really see an impact on maximizing your legacy.
And there’s three common areas that we really see that I’m going to touch on this week. The first one is charitable giving. Charitable giving can be done in many different ways. But how we do it and when we do it, can have a bigger impact on what we’re actually giving. And we can do that through retirement accounts, and establishing them as a Beneficiary IRA Retirement Account. Or we can look at setting up a Donor Advised Fund. Or maybe we set up an actual charitable trust. All of these are going to have an impact on how much you’re able to give, and how much you have to give away to taxes.
The second topic we touch on a lot is real estate. And we can save a lot in attorney fees and court costs if we set up a proper estate plan. If you have real estate in multiple counties or even multiple states, it can get very expensive to go through probate in every single county and every single state that you have real property. And so if we strategize ahead of time, and we put together an estate plan that accounts for your real estate, we can save a lot of money. The third piece is large retirement accounts, and this has become a bigger issue in the last year or so as the stretch IRA as it was known, in which you could take the, beneficiary could take their life and stretch out the distributions throughout their life - that’s no longer in existence. Now we have 10 years. And so now it makes a lot more sense to review who, when and how we’re going to distribute retirement accounts.
And that’s what were looking at when we want to do estate planning and legacy planning. As a wealth advisor, we’re not going to complete your estate plan. But we want to be sitting there, alongside you, guiding you through that process. Because at the end of the day, we should be there for you. We’re going to have to help execute that. And we should be sitting there to help give you ideas one when it needs to be reviewed again.
And so, if in 2021 it’s your goal to get your estate plan done, find a wealth advisor to sit down with who will be there to guide you through that process and help you along the way.
And then join us next week for our fourth topic in our 7 Pillar Series, Tax Planning.
Securities offered through LPL Financial, Member FINRA/SIPC. Investment Advice offered through Priebe Wealth, a registered investment advisor and separate entity from LPL Financial.
This information is not intended to be a substitute for specific individualized tax or legal advice. We suggest that you discuss your specific situation with a qualified tax or legal advisor.