How to Protect Your Estate If Long-Term Care Becomes Necessary
Once you understand what long-term care (LTC) is and the real risks it can pose to your finances, goals, and family, you can begin to plan accordingly. Addressing the possibility of long-term care early puts you in a stronger position to manage its potential financial and personal impact.
What...
Why Long-Term Care Planning Is a Critical Part of Estate Planning (Even If You Are Healthy)
For many people, estate planning sounds like a final act—a set of instructions for what happens to your accounts and other assets only after you are gone.
In reality, a truly comprehensive estate plan also helps protect you during your lifetime. While a standard plan covers medical and financial...
Why Long-Term Care Planning Matters to Your Client’s Financial and Estate Plan
An effective plan for the future goes far beyond controlling and directing asset transfers at death. When structured properly, an estate plan also protects against incapacity during life, ensuring that a client’s medical and financial affairs can be managed without court intervention.
But one risk that many estate plans...
When a Client’s Capacity Is in Question: Managing a Financial Crisis in Real Time
There are calls advisors hope they never receive—but increasingly, they are becoming part of the landscape of wealth management.
A family member, often a spouse or adult child, contacts you urgently. They are concerned that the client can no longer manage their finances, is making unclear or inconsistent decisions,...
Protecting the Portfolio and the Person: Five Critical Moves After a Client Is Diagnosed with Dementia
A dementia diagnosis changes the nature of the advisory relationship. Before a diagnosis, the focus may be on recognizing subtle changes and cautiously responding. After a diagnosis, it shifts to managing risk, supporting the client, and putting protective structures in place while the client can still participate in decisions.
When a Client’s Behavior Changes: A Guide for Advisors
At some point, most advisors will work with clients who experience cognitive decline.
The challenge is that these changes rarely become obvious all at once. They tend to emerge gradually - subtle at first and easy to explain away. A missed detail here, a repeated question there. On their...
Sudden Wealth Event: Restructuring for Complexity and Tax Efficiency
Good news in the form of a sudden windfall can force a family into a new financial position that materially alters their legacy and estate plan.
While newly acquired wealth may seem purely positive, it can attract the attention of the Internal Revenue Service and prompt an evaluation of...
How to Support a Client’s Adult Child Through a Personal Crisis
Whether it is the onset of a disability or chronic illness later in life or struggles with substance abuse, financial collapse, or bankruptcy, a personal crisis affecting a client’s adult child can affect the entire family.
Parents may feel an urgent need to help but are not always sure...
The Unexpected Death of a Spouse: Immediate Support for Clients
Your clients planned a life together. Nothing could have prepared them for this.
When a client’s spouse unexpectedly passes away, death is no longer theoretical. Decisions that may have been discussed briefly in a planning conversation are now a lived reality, and the situation demands both sensitivity and urgency.
A Windfall and a Target: Navigating Family Expectations After Sudden Wealth
Good news in the form of a sudden windfall can put your family in a new financial position that may materially alter your legacy and estate plan.
And while it may seem like a pure positive, it can also attract the attention of the Internal Revenue Service and prompt...