Incapacity Planning Information Your Clients Need to Know – What Does an Agent Under a Medical Power of Attorney Do?
Informed consent in medicine is an ethical and legal requirement for treatment. It is one of the core principles of the American Medical Association and ensures that patients can ask questions and obtain information about a treatment or procedure and explicitly consent to it.
There are recognized exceptions to...
Incapacity Planning Information Your Clients Need to Know – Helping Clients with Their Financial Decisions
Although we may not always recognize it, financial decisions and tasks are a part of our everyday lives. They range from daily spending habits to more complex financial planning and include everything from checking account balances and paying bills to updating insurance and signing contracts to making investments and retirement planning.
Incapacity Planning Information Your Clients Need to Know – Why Your Clients Need to Worry About Incapacity Planning
Death is the elephant in the room when it comes to talking about estate planning with clients. To avoid causing undue distress, we often edge around it, referring to heirs and beneficiaries or using terms like pass away or pass on.
This is something of a professional courtesy. Clients...
Incapacity Planning: The Other Part of Estate Planning – Whom Do You Trust to Make Your Medical Decisions?
It might be a stretch to say that if you have your health, you have everything. However, to some people, decisions about their health are arguably more personal in nature and more important to their overall well-being than financial decisions.
This leads to the question of who will step...
Incapacity Planning: The Other Part of Estate Planning – Whom Do You Trust to Make Your Financial Decisions?
You wake up and check your investments over a cup of coffee. That tech stock you have been eyeing continues to trend upward, so you log in to your online brokerage account and buy some shares.
Later in the day, you get a notice that your mortgage payment has...
Incapacity Planning: The Other Part of Estate Planning – Why You Need to Worry About Incapacity Planning
Death is the elephant in the room when we talk about estate planning. We often use phrases like pass away and pass on to make our meetings feel more comfortable and avoid being overly macabre, but the not-so-subtle subtext of an estate plan is death’s inevitability.
If death is...
Helping Clients Stay Financially and Logistically Prepared
When Clients Travel, Small Gaps Can Turn into Big Problems
Travel takes us out of our comfort zone, exposes us to new stimuli, and can rekindle a sense of awe as we leave the familiar behind and embrace the unknown.
It also challenges us to think and act differently.
But by stripping away our daily...
Estate Planning Red Flag -You Didn’t Place Restrictions on your Charitable Gifts
Charitable giving allows you to support causes you care about while potentially reducing your estate tax burden. However, making unrestricted gifts to charity without careful estate planning can create unintended consequences that may diminish both your benefits and the long-term impact of the gifts.
An unrestricted gift gives a...
Estate Planning Red Flag – You Own Property Jointly with your Child and Haven’t Planned Properly
There are certain estate planning strategies that, on the surface, may sound appealing. This includes owning property jointly with a child or other family member. However, in practice, these techniques can result in unwelcome outcomes that outweigh any potential benefits.
To be clear, owning an asset with your child...
What’s my art collection worth?
Proper estate planning is important when accounting for works of art
If you possess paintings, sculptures and other pieces of art, they may represent a significant portion of your estate. Thus, these assets must be properly accounted for in your estate plan.
In your planning, you’ll...