What is Needed to Organize Your Estate? | Planning for a Successful Future

How Do I Know Where to Begin Estate Planning? 

First, let’s talk about what estate planning is. Estate Planning is the process of anticipating how to distribute assets and settle taxes at the end of life. Estate planning is usually looked at only in pivotal points of your life.  Getting married, expanding your family, or losing a loved one.  However, with the changing world and list of digital assets, periodical reviews can be recommended.

Let’s discuss the steps we suggest to help you reach these goals.

Gather an Understanding of Your Current Assets

When deciding how to distribute assets at the end of life, the first step should organically be to dive into your current financial snapshot.  If you’re a current AO Wealth client, you should have a pretty good understanding of this package.  In fact, you can log in to your portal at any time to load up your current assets.

Your assets are cash, including money in checking accounts, savings accounts, and money market accounts. It also includes intangible personal property, such as stocks, bonds, and other forms of business ownership, as well as intellectual property, royalties, patents, and copyrights, etc.  So as you would imagine, your Will needs to account for all of these individual pieces.

AO Wealth Advisory Team

Understanding Your Will Package

A Will Package is a guiding collection of how to distribute assets, make decisions, and appointments to those making the decisions.  This includes:

• The Will

• Health Care Directive

• Living Will

• Power of Attorney

While we cannot give legal advice, it is important to keep in mind that fair does not always mean equal.  There are many factors to building a package structure that works best for each situation.  As your Certified Financial Planner ®, we are here to work with you to organize your wishes. We are here to help you plan for your future and find financial freedom; whatever that may be to you.  Estate Planning is a service we provide for our clients.

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After Preparing Your Will, What’s Next?

Once the hard part is over, now it is time to make sure the package lives in the proper places.  Consider giving copies to the beneficiaries with in, updating your doctors office, and even your wealth advisor.

It may be important to make periodical status checks into your package in case there needs to be any beneficiary adjustments, updates to taxes, additions of new digital assets, or even to make sure the latest language is applied to protect your loved ones.

So the moral of the story? With all financial planning, it may be important to continue to check in on the progress you are making. You can do this by setting up accountability check-ins where you will discuss and reassess your financial situation and Estate Plan. 

Advisory services offered through A.O. Wealth Advisory, LLC, a registered investment adviser.