Estate Planning Packages and Other Services
Estate Planning Packages
We offer several estate planning options, where each package or plan is highly customized to meet your unique family situation and dynamics, assets, and personal values, goals and objectives. From will-based plans for the individual or family who wants the basics and are not concerned with avoiding probate to more robust plans for those who want to avoid probate, provide asset protection and/or eliminate or minimize estate taxes. Our estate planning fees generally range from $2,500 to $8,500+ depending upon a client’s particular situation and complexities, such as estate taxes, business interests, international tax issues, and the combination of plans to achieve alternative, additional objectives that may include charitable donations, retirement planning, estate tax minimization and long-term care planning.
| Will-Based Plan | “Probate Avoidance” Plan | “Estate Tax” Plan | Wealth Preservation Plan | “Nursing Home” Plan |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| For the individual or couple who wants to take care of basic estate planning needs and is not concerned about avoiding probate or privacy of their affairs. | For the individual or family who wants to avoid probate and gain peace of mind knowing that in the event of their death or incapacity, all assets will be transferred to heirs without court involvement or unnecessary delays. | For the family or individual who wants to avoid probate and minimize estate taxes, as well as achieve lifetime incapacity protection, keeps your affairs completely private, and avoids burdening your family with time inefficient administration responsibilities. | For the client who has advanced planning needs involving complicated estate tax, asset protection or business interest issues, or additional trusts such as standalone retirement trusts, irrevocable life insurance trusts, charitable donations, special needs trust. | For the individual or married couple who wants to protect assets from being depleted due to prohibitive cost of nursing home care, while also avoiding probate for those assets transferred to the trust. Asset transfers (or trust funding) is required to shelter assets for care. |
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Additional Estate Planning Services
| Full Initial Trust Funding Services | Funding a trust means naming the trust as the death beneficiary or transferring ownership of your assets (like real estate, bank accounts, investments) from your personal name into the name of the trust, making the trust the legal owner; this is crucial for the trust to work as intended, bypassing probate and allowing seamless management if you become incapacitated, because an unfunded trust is just an empty legal document.
We analyze how each of your assets are titled and prepare an asset inventory report confirming what you own and how you own it and then complete all the forms and other documents necessary to initially fund your trust and designate beneficiaries. We transfer the title of your real estate and other property into your trust so that plans work as designed for you, your family, and your loved ones. Where the client opts not to have us handle trust funding, we provide funding instructions in each trust package to complete on your own. |
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| Maintenance Plan | An estate plan is a living thing; don’t let it wilt! Your family changes either because of divorce, marriage, births. Your distribution design changes. There are changes in the tax laws and regulations. There are changes in the Medicaid regulations. Estate planning is not a “one and done” task. We offer a maintenance program where we meet annually to review your documents and your goals to ensure that they are aligned. |
| Probate | If your loved one’s estate needs to go through probate, or if you have been named as a Personal Representative of an estate, we can help you open a probate (an informal probate or formal probate), secure appointment as the fiduciary for the estate, distribute assets, providing any accounting, and close the estate. |
| Trust Administration | If your loved one died and had a revocable living trust or you have been named as the Successor Trustee, we can help you with the process of administering the trust, including the filing of the Massachusetts estate tax return and allocating assets to the tax-sheltered shares (“marital” and “family” subtrusts). |
| Existing Estate Plan Review | If you had your estate planning documents drafted by another firm several years ago and you want to understand your current plan and whether it meets your current needs, we can review your existing plan and offer advice whether the plan is still the best fit for you and your family. |
| Amendments or Restatement of Estate Plan | Estate plans need to be updated from time to time. You may want to change your designated guardians, add a new baby or charity to the estate plan, account for an inheritance that may generate an estate tax at your death, make a specific gift to class of beneficiaries, transfer a vacation home to an existing trust, or account for any other life changes that may produce unintended results, such as bypassing a gift to the grandchildren, forgetting to transfer ownership or name a death beneficiary to newly acquired assets that could create the need for a probate at your death. |
