Adaptive Planning
- Our attorneys are dedicated to helping you protect, preserve, and grow your estate assets through comprehensive planning
- Our Spokane estate planning attorneys can help with drafting trusts, wills, power of attorney, and business formation to protect your estate
- We can assist with health care directives and living wills, so your plan reflects your individual principles and spiritual beliefs
What is Estate Planning?
In legal circles, an estate equals assets. In other words, your estate is, basically, your money and your stuff!
Estate assets can include real estate, vehicles, stocks, bonds, savings accounts, an insurance policy benefit, retirement, cryptocurrencies, and more. Interest in a lawsuit is an asset. Valuing your ‘estate’ can take into account factors such as future earning potential, sweat equity in a business, or even a marriage.
Be More and Live More with Effective Planning
The Whipple Law Group is dedicated to helping our clients protect, preserve, and grow their estate assets. In addition, we assist our clients in determining how and when they want to have assets available to them throughout their life. From creating a will to developing a trust, we help you create a plan that perfectly reflects your wishes. We’ll not only protect your interests, but the interests of those you care about as well.
Proper estate planning does not need to be expensive. Our steadfast opinion is that effective planning is critical, and accessible. To accomplish this, we provide a variety of interrelated estate planning services, designed to meet each of our individual client’s needs. Please call us today to set up a consultation, and speak with a Spokane estate planning attorney to find out how we can help you plan for your future.
Dream Large While Looking Long Term
Too often, ‘estate planners’ focus on end of life issues. At The Whipple Law Group, we consider this shortsighted.
Estate planning is life planning.
Estate planning should meet you where you are and work to get you where you want to be. Our clients have constantly changing priorities and goals throughout the course of their life. Decisions related to estate planning must change as life does. Effective estate planning anticipates these changes.
For example, when you are 18 you might be thinking about your first job and a buying a car.
In later life, you may marry, plan a wedding, purchase a house, and start a family.
Different priorities, different income streams, call for different strategies.
Later, issues such as financing the costs of children approaching college age, special needs children, bigger toys, investment properties, and helping out parents all work to change perceptions, alter priorities, and require different estate planning scenarios.
How a Whipple Law Group Spokane Estate Planning Attorney Can Help
Some of the estate-related products we help you develop include:
These legal instruments empower you to protect your current assets while planning for the future transfer of these assets to your loved ones. We assist clients in determining the ‘best fit’ in terms of the trust and the benefitting individual. We also discuss the need to appoint a trustee and decide how best to determine ‘successor’ trustees.
Business Formation and Preservation, including family farms –
An often overlooked avenue to preserve and protect assets is through the incorporation of a business. We assist our clients to draft formation documents that are flexible enough to suit their objectives but strong enough to ensure implementation.
Wills –
Writing a valid Will is the one of the most caring things you will ever do for your loved ones. We sensitively assist our clients in thinking through choices and helping to define their wishes. Your estate attorney will then formalize these decisions into a robust planning document that will convey our clients’ wishes beyond their passing.
DPOA –
A current Durable Power of Attorney (“DPOA”) is vital to have on hand in the event you become sick. If you are in the hospital and unconscious, who will pay the mortgage, the bills, feed your pets, and make your important medical decisions? You can, and should, choose who that person or persons are to be. The DPOA document grants authority to act on your behalf only in the event it is needed. However, you must draft your DPOA before it is needed or else it is often too late. Call us today to have this important document prepared as soon as possible.
Health Care Directives/Living Wills –
Another vital component of your suite of estate planning documents is your Health Care Directives. These documents state your wishes regarding life-prolonging measures to be implemented in an end-of-life situation. Our estate attorneys can help you explore these issues, empathically assisting you to reach the decisions best suited to you and reflective of your individual principles and spiritual beliefs.
Another important benefit presented by having your Living Will completed, is that it relieves your loved ones from trying to decide what you would have preferred. We have seen many unfortunate arguments avoided because of the availability of a current Health Care Directive. Please do not hesitate to call a qualified Spokane estate planning attorney today to have your estate planning documents updated.
Special Needs Trusts –
These legal documents, also called, Supplemental Needs Trusts (“SNT”) are specialized vehicles for the benefit of persons who have a disability. A SNT ‘holds’ funds for the benefit of the individual with a mental or physical disability. The SNT allows the individual to continue to maintain eligibility and receive benefits from needs based government programs.
Pet/Animal Trusts-
Many of our clients, and most all of our staff, share their hearts, homes, and lives with one or more beloved animals. The gifts of love and support our pets provide defies description. Making necessary arrangements for the care of our animals in the event of our passing is critical.
A Pet Trust allocates resources, from your estate, dedicated to providing for your companion animals. It serves to identify the person(s) responsible for administering these funds and guarantee the care and placement of your animals. Providing planning for the well-being of your pets is, particularly, important in cases involving long-lived animals including dogs, cats, horses, birds, and reptiles.
Spendthrift Trusts –
Our clients are intelligent, caring, responsible individuals working hard to earn assets and grow their estates. They want to provide a satisfying quality of life for themselves and for their family. The very last thing they want is to have the gifts they leave their children to cause harm.
Parents can use spendthrift trusts to specifically decide where, when, and how they want the assets they leave to be made available to their heirs. We talk with our clients about each of their children individually. We discuss options including restricting trust benefits for special purposes like schooling, making distributions over time rather than in a lump sum, and how to protect family assets from being taken by persons outside the family. Prudent decision making now can serve to provide love and support to your family long after you pass. Let our Spokane estate planning attorneys help ensure your legacy accomplishes the goals and desires intended.
Firearm Trusts –
Increasingly, complicated firearms laws can cause families to lose priceless heirlooms and collector pieces. Some heirlooms may have been a part of the family for years. We assist our clients to avoid the pitfalls of testacy and inheritance laws that lead to such unfortunate, irreparable consequences. We effectively help our clients construct the legal mechanisms necessary to keep your legacy firearms in trust for future generations.
Click here for more firearm trust information.
Schedule Your Consultation with a Whipple Law Group Spokane Estate Planning Attorney Today!
Estate Planning Blogs
Here are the latest blogs regarding common Spokane estate planning matters. Please reach out to us if you would like more information on any of these issues.
