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Estate Planning in Houston

Making an impact during your lifetime and beyond

Estate and gift planning can help to shape your priorities.

Most clients want their wealth to impact their future family generations or charitable causes. We work to understand and define those goals. Using that understanding and knowledge of the available tools and difficulties that inter-generational wealth transfers can present, we help our clients formulate and execute a plan to achieve their goals effectively and efficiently.

Estate and generational wealth planning

Estate planning enables you to protect your accumulated wealth and assets for your family and the causes you care about. These protections often come into effect in the event of death, but can also apply to circumstances during life, such as gift planning, guardianship, life events, and more.

At Financial Synergies, we provide the estate planning advice you need to guide your loved ones and safeguard your legacy, allowing your wealth to have a direct and lasting impact.

Some of the elements and data necessary for comprehensive estate planning in Houston include:

Your estate plan should be as unique as a fingerprint. The advisors at Financial Synergies will help guide you through all aspects of the estate planning process to ensure it encompasses the goals you have for your family and generations to come.

Trusts and wills should be created by an attorney. While Financial Synergies does not create these documents, we will work closely with your attorney to make sure all records are current and consistent with your overall financial plan.

Wills & Trusts

Translate your wishes into instructions for the future.

Wills and trusts are the foundation of estate planning and wealth transfer management. A well drafted will methodically distributes assets to the new owners. A trust can be established by will or independently in conjunction with will provisions. Your will and trusts work together to achieve the long-term movement and management of your assets.

Conversations with clients usually center on their hopes, dreams, and fears for the next generation. Control and management typically create the greatest concerns for clients designing an estate plan – including protecting assets from creditors, predators, and in-laws.

In coordination with estate attorneys, we’ll help you ensure the wealth you wish to pass on to your family is protected.

Estate Tax

Avoidable, if you plan for it.

With a high federal estate tax exemption, most estates have no tax concerns (of course Congress could always change that!) Those estates exceeding that amount face important decisions on controlling the size of the taxable estate and its ultimate treatment.

Numerous strategies using trusts, family limited partnerships, charitable planning, and annual gifting can eliminate the estate tax completely. Complexity and the willingness to give up ownership can impact the estate plan design.

When necessary, we’ll help coordinate estate tax mitigation strategies with your estate attorney and CPA.

Titling & Beneficiary Designations

The details are everything.

Most estate plans involve multiple types of accounts and assets. Incorrect beneficiary designations and titling issues can completely undo the most thorough and complex estate plan – creating a legal nightmare for your family.

A trust governs its own assets while the will only governs probate assets. Retirement accounts and life insurance can bypass these instruments without proper beneficiary designations. Incorrect titling can inadvertently cause gifts or unintended disinheritances. We review all beneficiary designations and titling to make sure it corresponds and coordinates correctly with the overall estate plan.

As major life events unfold (e.g., marriage, children, death, divorce, etc.), it’s critical that we review and update your legacy goals to ensure your estate plan is current.

Collaboration With Your Estate Attorney

Although we are not attorneys, we will gladly work closely with your estate attorney to ensure your financial plan is aligned with your estate and gift planning needs. If you do not have an estate attorney, and would like to engage one, we have several strategic partnerships with attorneys in the Houston area. We can certainly coordinate that engagement and will continue working with them on your behalf in the future.

Attorneys provide critical services for estate plans, including the drafting of legal documents like wills and trusts. As your financial quarterback, we’ll remove your burden of trying to coordinate an entire team of financial professionals.

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