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...
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...
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...
Estate Planning Scams: What Seniors Need to Know
Creating an estate plan is an important step in protecting your loved ones and ensuring that your assets are distributed according to your wishes. Unfortunately, scammers know that people who want to safeguard their estates are often willing to act quickly.
Even a carefully drafted estate plan can be...
When Helping Out Puts the Roof Over Your Head at Risk:Should You Ever Use Your Home as Collateral for Your Child’s Debt?
It is the kind of phone call that keeps parents awake at night. Your daughter is on the line saying, “I need some help.”
She is not hurt. It is not a brush with the law. She is in financial trouble and needs backup.
The business...
A Refresher Course: The Rules and Planning Strategies for Taking Required Minimum Distributions
If you have substantial savings in a traditional IRA or employer-sponsored retirement plan, you likely know that required minimum distributions (RMDs) must begin at a certain age. RMDs are taxable and, depending on your balances in these accounts, can even push you into a higher tax bracket.
Beyond the...
The Window of Opportunity:Legal Steps to Take When You First Notice Memory Problems
You have been seeing the signs for months. Mom or Dad has not quite been themselves lately. They are forgetting things more often: appointments, addresses, payments, names. The other day, they got lost going to a place they have frequented for years.
When you try to bring it up,...
A Dementia Diagnosis Changes More Than Healthcare – Seven Steps to Take While You Can
With dementia cases in the United States estimated to double by 2060—and roughly 42 percent of Americans over age 55 at risk of developing dementia according to recent research1—a diagnosis is something that more and more families will face.
The statistics are sobering in the abstract. They feel different...