Defining Your Estate Planning Goals
What is the first step in estate planning? We believe it is determining your goals for your plan. Planning for your future and your family’s future is not a “one-size-fits-all” situation. Everyone has different life circumstances and wishes for the future. Your estate plan should reflect your unique goals. Our knowledgeable lawyers can prepare a plan for you that addresses these goals using various legal documents. Here are some goals that your estate plan might incorporate:
- Wanting to leave your property to particular relatives
- Giving to charity from your estate
- Protecting a relative who needs financial assistance
- Ensuring that a child from a first marriage receives an inheritance
- Conveying your wishes about end-of-life medical care to doctors
- Maintaining your estate’s value despite potential estate administration costs or taxes
As you schedule a planning consultation with a member of Henke & Williams’s legal team, think about your unique goals.
Advice from Our Estate Planning Attorneys
When you meet with your lawyer, you will discuss your unique circumstances. People with complicated family situations or high-net-worth estates may require more than the basic documents. People with smaller estates may not have to worry about estate tax planning or paying estate taxes but might still have other financial issues to consider. In addition, people who have family members with special needs may want additional documents to help create a more secure future.
Our Houston-based attorneys aim to prepare estate planning documents targeted for your individual needs. Appropriately drafted and executed estate planning documents can accomplish different types of tasks. Here are a few examples:
- Financial durable power of attorney: Appoints an agent to handle your financial affairs. Your agent’s authority can start now or when triggered by an event. For example, your power of attorney might go into effect if you become mentally incapacitated.
- Medical power of attorney: Appoints an agent to make medical decisions for you if you can no longer make those decisions yourself.
- Directive to Physicians or living will: Explains your end-of-life treatment preferences to doctors and medical staff.
- Will, revocable or irrevocable trust, or other estate planning devices: Distributes property to heirs and beneficiaries.
- Various trusts and related estate planning tools: Plan for the future of family members with special needs when you can no longer care for them.
- Trusts and other estate planning documents: Accomplish your goals of Medicaid planning or probate avoidance.
Your estate planning attorney can help develop a plan that meets your specific goals.
Developing a Coordinated Estate Plan with Our Firm
A comprehensive estate plan is not usually a do-it-yourself project. Your estate plan must take into account not only basic documents like a will, but also the entirety of your financial assets and property. Our attorneys take the time to make sure that beneficiary designations on insurance, investment accounts, and retirement plans are coordinated with the overall estate plans. Considering how to handle jointly-owned property is another important step when crafting an estate plan.
Leave all these little details to Henke & Williams’s estate planning team. Our attorneys are here for you when you need a detailed planning that takes into account your specific property and assets. Getting an appropriate estate plan into place isn’t always simple. However, it’s also crucial to leave your family the right guidance through a properly-developed estate plan. That’s why you need our team as your estate planning guide.
Call Our Houston Lawyers for Help with Your Texas Estate Plan
Our experienced estate planning lawyers develop estate plans that help clients reach their goals. Estate planning is our passion and we work with you on individualized estate planning to meet your specific needs. To get started on your plan, please contact us by calling (713) 936-5521 or using our convenient Contact Form.
