Estate Planning is important in ensuring that your wishes are met both during your lifetime, and after your death. Your Estate Plan ensures
that upon your death, your assets will be managed and transferred in the most financially efficient and tax-effective way to the people you
wish to benefit.
An Estate Plan includes:
Your assets may include property, shares, superannuation, insurances or valuables.
In short, an Estate Plan formalises your wishes in writing, and ensures there is no uncertainty on how you would like your assets handled.
As accountants & financial advisors we are best placed to truly understand your personal and business structure to discuss with you your
wishes, identify tax efficient strategies for your estate planning, and ensure this is all correctly articulated to a lawyer so that your
Will truly reflects your intentions.
We also know when we ask clients if they have a Will, or how old is the existing Will, that they have the best intentions of actioning. The reality is, life gets busy and the complex administrative side of preparing such paperwork can mean important things fall off the 'to do list'.
We aim to streamline this process and make it happen for you to ensure you and your family are protected
To make a well-rounded and complete Estate Plan, we need to gather detailed information from you. If you already do your Financial Planning with us, this process will be quick and relatively straight forward as we will already have much of the information at hand.
We will send you a video to explain the process and assist you in what to consider when completing our Estate Planning Questionnaire.
Once we have the detailed information from you, we can continue onto Step 2 of the Estate Planning Process.
Using your questionnaire responses we will produce an interactive Family Tree Diagram and Entity Diagram (personal, joint, super, family trust & companies) and the assets within each entity. We will meet with you in person or via zoom, and discuss your wishes on how you want your estate to be divided. We'll then show you real-time how this will look based on your wishes to ensure your intentions flow through to the right people. We can make live changes with you and show you how this flows down your family tree and assets.
In this meeting, we'll ensure we have addressed all the assets that need to be included in your Estate Plan. We'll present a personalised
Estate Briefing Paper.
We understand that having conversations of this nature can seem heavy. We'll work collaboratively with you to ensure we leave no stone
unturned to ensure a complete and well-considered Estate Plan.
Your Estate Briefing Paper is your final guideline to ensure that all your hard work is not dissolved with unnecessary fees or taxes, and that your beneficiaries will not be financially burdened. It can be somewhat considered as a map. A map of where you are now, and what is to happen with all pieces of your life after you are gone.
Having an Estate Briefing Paper prepared by strategic tax advisors means that we can guide the structure of your Estate Plan to ensure your assets will be managed and transferred to your beneficiaries in the most financially efficient and tax effective way.
You may take your Estate Briefing Paper to your own lawyer, or you may choose to work with our lawyer to confirm your Estate Plan meets all the legal requirements to ensure a water-tight strategy.
Using the Estate Briefing Paper prepared by SMART Business Solutions, the lawyer will draft your:
If using our lawyer:
If using your own lawyer:
Your Estate Plan is not official until:
If using our lawyer:
If using your own lawyer:
Come and see what happens when the precision of accounting and foresight of financial planning collide.
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