Wisconsin Trusts & Estates Blog
Estate planning used to be pretty easy when every family was a husband, wife, and two and a half kids surrounded by a picket fence. That’s often not how it works anymore, and we now do many estate plans for blended families.
Like a lot of issues involving blended families, there are good solutions available in this type of planning, but it can take a little more time and thought to get there. This post explains how we work through plans for blended families.
Choosing the right people to carry out a plan is often just as important as designing the plan correctly. We spend a great deal of time in our estate planning meetings discussing who to choose for a variety of key roles. These roles include financial roles, like estate administrator, and personal roles, like guardians for minor children and powers of attorney for health care.
This post discusses the various roles and the skill set necessary in each.
Family cabins are often a source of memorable family experiences, and assets most likely to be kept in the family as part of an estate plan.
In most family cabins, the parents (generation 1) are the original owners, and at some point pass the property on to their children (generation 2). We have worked both with parents and with second generation owners to structure cabin ownership in a way that meets their needs.
We are pleased to have been able to participate in the Community Foundation’s video on planned giving! Nice job by Thousand Lumens putting together this video for the Foundation.
One of the greatest privileges of being an estate planning attorney is working with clients who are making charitable gifts as part of their estate plan. Our clients’ charitable goals vary widely, but in many cases they leverage our local community foundation (or, in some cases, a community foundation in a different area) to support long-term charitable goals for our community that otherwise would not be workable.
Here’s how this potential partnership can work.
(Note that this post assumes an understanding of charitable giving basics. Our charitable giving primer can be found here. Also, in the interest of full disclosure, I'm on the board of our local community foundation, the Community Foundation of Central Wisconsin. Wisconsin Rapids and Wausau also have their own foundations.)
One of the best parts of this job is working with people who want to include charitable giving in their estate plans. Here's how we like to talk about this.
We start with how charitable giving fits into the plan. Many of our clients' primary beneficiaries are individuals (like children), but they want to include charitable giving in a small way, typically by giving a small amount to their church or another organization they care about. For those folks, generally deciding on a gift is just a matter of deciding on an amount and an organization.
For others, charitable giving is the main objective, or is a significant portion of their plan.
For a long time, I’ve been using WisPACT trusts to hold money for special needs beneficiaries. For people who are unfamiliar with special needs trusts or WisPACT, what WisPACT does is manage a pooled special needs trust (SNT). Like any other SNT, the funds are managed to supplement—not replace—government programs like SSI and MA. The pooled part means that disabled individuals have their own accounts with WisPACT. WisPACT hires a corporate money manager (currently, Chemical Bank) to manage the funds as a single pool, and gets a favorable fee structure, since it has millions to invest. WisPACT makes decisions about distributions in consultation with a trust advisor (a family member or guardian of the beneficiary).
