Legacy Planning | Alexander Estate Law

Leave a Lasting Legacy

Legacy Planning is a comprehensive type of estate planning that allows you to transfer wealth smoothly and effectively to your children and grandchildren. Legacy Planning focuses on leaving both a financial legacy and a non-financial legacy. By doing so, the cornerstone of your legacy plan will be to pass on family values, traditions, memories and more to future generations.

When you engage in Legacy Planning, you take a global approach to structuring the manner in which your assets are transferred to your loved ones. The aim is to design a strategy that will achieve goals and objectives that are important to you long after you have passed away.

Christopher M. Alexander has represented individuals and families for 25 years and has a reputation for designing comprehensive, customized estate plans. If you have questions regarding legacy planning options based on your unique circumstances and long-term goals, contact Christopher M. Alexander, Esq. at (513) 228–1100 or chris@alexander-legal.com.

Legacy Planning for The Modern Family

Legacy Planning is an ideal method to address the unique estate planning challenges faced by the modern family structure, including blended families, multi-parent families, single parent families and same-sex couples.

By integrating financial and non-financial values, Legacy Planning allows you to achieve your goals even where real-life struggles would negatively impact traditional estate planning. Is your estate plan prepared to adapt to inevitable changes in family dynamic:

Ensure family heirlooms and valuable personal property are properly transferred to your intended loved one;
Ensure wealth remains in the family in the event one of your children or grandchildren go through divorce, bankruptcy, or other financially crisis;
Ensure a long-term nursing home stay does not dissipate wealth;
Ensure wealth remains in the family if a surviving spouse remarries;
Ensure assets are managed properly if you have a fiscally irresponsible child or grandchild.

Legacy Planning Tools

Legacy Planning offers opportunities to construct an estate plan that will achieve goals and objectives so that your values are transferred together with your assets. Legacy Planning tools allow you to emphasize specific family values such as education, home ownership, marriage, parenthood, and business ownership.

Emphasize Family Values: You may want to emphasize the importance of marriage and parenthood. To do so, your Trust Agreement may accelerate or delay distributions based upon future events such as marriage and the birth of children.

Emphasize Education: You may want to emphasize the importance of higher education. To do so, your Trust Agreement may accelerate distributions based upon graduation or acceptance by a professional licensing board.

Emphasize Home Ownership: You may want to emphasize the importance of home ownership. To do so, your Trust Agreement may accelerate distributions, provide private loans or guarantee mortgage payments after closing.

Encourage Charitable Giving: There are a variety of legal structures that allow philanthropic efforts. After your death, you can require your children or grandchildren to spend a predetermined amount for charitable causes before they receive an inheritance from you.

The goal of Legacy Planning is to integrate financial and non-financial goals for your family’s future. In addition to simply focusing on transferring assets, legacy planning promotes the values you aspire to leave behind. Christopher M. Alexander can guide you through creating a legacy estate plan tailored to meet your goals and values.