Estate Planning

Maximize Your Legacy
A lifetime of prudent saving and wise investing can be destroyed by poor estate planning. That is why our Portfolio Managers have always focused on not only growing your assets, but also efficiently distributing assets to family and charity.

“A lifetime of prudent saving and wise investing can be destroyed by poor estate planning.”    Our Portfolio Managers have a deep understanding of the importance of asset titling and beneficiary designations, as well as sophisticated estate planning techniques, to maximize the transfer of assets. The Estate Planning section of our Wealth Management Review summarizes how your assets will be distributed in understandable terms, and this allows you to modify your plans as needed to ensure your estate plans effectively meet your wishes.

By integrating our investment management and portfolio construction expertise with our estate planning knowledge, our Portfolio Managers work together with the attorneys of Johnson Trust Company to help you employ sophisticated estate planning techniques to minimize estate taxes.


A Unique Approach to Estate Planning
Johnson Trust Company can assist with your estate planning by first reviewing and summarizing your wills, existing trusts, and other estate planning documents. We analyze the effectiveness of your existing estate planning documents within the context of your current wealth, asset titling, beneficiary designations and family relationships.

We then encourage you to quantify answers to the Three Key Questions to the right that can clarify your estate planning goals.

Once we determine your goals, we identify and structure planning strategies to achieve your goals using short-term and longer-term strategies. We typically work closely with your attorney or other advisors in this idea-generation process. Finally, we collaborate with your advisors to finalize your wealth transfer plans, complete the necessary documents and implement the plans.
  

Three Key Questions

Quantify Your Financial Independence
How much wealth do you need to hold during your lifetime to feel financially secure?

Identify an Appropriate Family Legacy
How much wealth do you feel is appropriate to transfer to family, and how, and when, should the wealth be transferred, given their special circumstances?

Maximize Your Contribution to Society
Do you wish to make charitable gifts with assets that remain or will likely go to the government in taxes? If yes, how and when do you wish to make the charitable gifts (e.g. during your lifetime, at death, over future generations?)


 
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