A Few of the Finer Things - April 2018
Estate Planning for the Modern Family
Several years ago I when I was attending a Raymond James Advanced Estate Planning conference, one of the speakers had the above title for his presentation. He started off by saying that he was just a boring estate planning “lifer” who didn’t keep up with popular culture. His wife and kids kept telling him that he needed to watch this new sitcom with them called “Modern Family” and so he eventually he did. Immediately his reaction was, “This is an estate planning nightmare! You have a successful business owner with a far younger wife and she has a child from a previous marriage (they later add a child of their own); one of his children is in a same-sex relationship with an adopted daughter; one of his children is in a “conventional” marriage with three kids…how do you work all of these factors into an effective estate plan?” Needless to say, his family didn’t particularly enjoy watching the show with him for very long!
However, his presentation was quite interesting and he brought up a lot of good points. I am in a blended family—Debbie and I married nearly nine years ago. I was a divorced father of two boys and she was a widowed mother of a girl and twin boys. We have a yours/mine/ours financial relationship—we each have our separate property and we have joint community property. Our financial plan is complex in that we want to take care of each other as well as everybody else…how we do that involves some careful planning.
In our Weiss Wealth Strategies practice, Kelly and I often start off our client meetings talking about titling of accounts and doing beneficiary reviews. We do this to make sure that clients’ financial houses are “in order” and to avoid unpleasant experiences down the road.
The attached article from Raymond James WORTHWHILE magazine is titled, “New Realities—Families have changed, but the need to protect wealth and build legacies remains” has a lot of good information.
– Gary Weiss, April 2018
Raymond James financial advisors do not render advice on tax or legal matters. You should discuss any tax or legal matters with the appropriate professional.
