No. 2 in Our Series: Creating Your Family’s Estate Plan – The Wills & Wellness Way

Once you decide to protect yourself, your loved ones and your finances with an estate plan, you will experience a wonderful feeling of peacefulness. Knowing that you are in good hands with our firm is truly priceless.

estate-planning-family-denverAfter you design your plan with our attorneys at your Family Wealth Planning Session, we get to work.

making sure that all of the details have been implemented in order to prepare for your Signing Ceremony, about 3-4 weeks out. We take the information that you have provided to us and put it into a visually welcoming chart that we call your Confirmation of Names & Fiduciaries. We then email this document to you (encrypted and password protected) so that you may review the names, spellings, and be sure that you have placed the right people in the right order in your plan.

 

Once we receive your go ahead, we carefully draft up your plan, making sure that all documents compliment each other and that your goals are described in thorough detail. During this time, you might change your mind as to who you wish to have guardianship over your children, or who you originally named as Trustee, for example.

 

No problem! Just be sure to let us know about 7 days ahead of your Signing Ceremony.

 

We want to make sure that your plan fits you! And, you can always call with questions or if you need help making a decision.

 

The Family Estate Plan Signing Ceremony

When you arrive for your Signing Ceremony, we will have your complete plan printed and will provide a notary as complimentary to you. We will sit down with you and go through each and every document, one by one, so that you fully understand everything that you are signing (our attorneys are expert legalese translators!) and that each document reflects your wishes to a “T”.

 

After all the documents are signed, we will set up a Post-Signing appointment for you about 3- 4 weeks out. During this time, we will be working on creating what we call your Family Wealth Inventory. This is an easy-view spreadsheet that lists out all of your financial accounts with instructions as to how to fund your trust. Each account is different and must be handled differently. In most cases, you will either need to update the primary beneficiary of your account to your Trust, or change ownership into the name of your Trust.

 

We are available for questions and guidance throughout this process. For those clients choosing our Wealth Plan, we will do all of the back end work so that all you need to do is sign your name a few times. This is a huge value and highly recommended for all clients as trust funding can be a cumbersome task.

 

After The Family Estate Plan Signing

 

At your Post-Signing, we will present to you your completed and compiled binder and talk to you about the extra “goodies” that we provide.

 

We call these documents our Heirloom Documents.They are documents where you can fill in the blanks on such items as “Letter to Our Children” (where you can write down how you and your partner met and more), “Letter to Our Children’s Guardian” (where you can write down your child’s routine and more), “Memorial Instructions”, etc. These are all the pieces of additional information that a loved one would really appreciate if they had to step into an important role for you.

 

Also at your Post-Signing, we get to do one of the most rewarding parts of the process – your Priceless Conversation.

 

The Priceless Conversation

 

We let you choose video or audio and then we sit down with you and records your answers to some very special questions like:

 

  • “How did you two meet?”
  • “What values would you want to pass on to your children?”
  • “What makes each of your children uniquely special?”

 

Without these recordings, it’s likely that these memories would be lost over time. This is an amazing gift to you and your family and we are grateful to be able to share the experience and provide this service to you.

 

After we say good-bye, we make sure that you know you can always call or write us if you have any questions or want to meet about anything else going on in your life. We encourage you to join our Membership Program for discounted services and ongoing support. All clients will receive a review of their plan every three years, but with Membership, you will also receive annual reviews, annual Priceless Conversations, and much more.

 

Contact us to learn more!