If you have questions about the eventual disposition of your assets, you’re in good company. Many people find the idea of wills or estate planning a little off-putting. Others improperly believe it’s only something that wealthy people must do.
Legal terminology may seem intimidating. Fortunately, asset planning is just the process of putting your affairs in good order to make matters easier for your family and heirs. When the time comes, sorting out your assets won’t have to be depressing, challenging, or expensive for them.
Asset planning for your heirs and beneficiaries starts with some simple steps:
- Review what you own
- Make a will
- Review beneficiaries of your retirement plans and other financial assets
Because planning is a positive step for your family, it’s important to get it done now. You will rest easier knowing they’re taken care of. Hiring an experienced financial assets lawyer can streamline the process.
Who Needs Asset Planning Assistance in Utah?
Clearly, high-net-worth families, individuals, entrepreneurs, or businesses often face situations that benefit from tax and gift planning. Whether an intergenerational transfer of business deals and wealth is planned or unplanned, it’s an opportunity to create tax efficiency and free up assets, time, and energy for the business or family.
An experienced law firm helps clients to identify creative solutions in these sorts of situations. Terry Spencer has decades of legal experience in designing effective client, family, and business plans in Utah. These plans are customized for your needs, including:
- Asset planning. We design creative and effective plans that focus on our clients' and families’ needs and goals.
- Fiduciary services. We advise corporate fiduciaries and trust offices.
- Trust administration. As trustees, we service family/charitable plans.
- Estates' administration. Our lawyers settle estates for individual executors/personal representatives, other attorneys, and professional fiduciaries.
- Litigation. Our law firm represents beneficiaries and fiduciaries in legal disputes.
- Non-profit or charitable organizations. We assist in achieving or maintaining the organization’s tax-exempt status, compliance, governance, and/or planned giving programs.
Legal Planning Analysis Specialists
Our legal team first analyzes your goals. We consider tax, income, and gift consequences in light of these unique goals. Core plans include healthcare documents, wills, revocable trust, and durable powers of attorney.
In more sophisticated planning, we consider generation-skipping trust, business investment vehicles, e.g. LLCs or limited partnerships, intra-family sales/loans, gift trust for minor children, qualified personal remainder trust, life insurance trust, retained annuity trust, or other trust vehicles that address your specific circumstances.
Charitable plans may be part of your goals. You may want to make outright gifts or restricted gifts. We consider the use of gift agreement negotiation, gifts of your unique assets, e.g. art or real estate, charitable remainder trust, or charitable lead trusts to accomplish them.
Estates administration includes the creation and implementation of your plan. After death, the administration includes filing probate documents with the court. Preliminarily, valuations of your probate and non-probate assets are essential.
We prepare tax returns, including fiduciary income tax returns, and analyze and manage state and federal tax consequences and audits. The disposition of your assets, e.g. funding trusts, may require additional tax planning and considerations. We also settle claims made against estates.
As trust administrators, we administer, work with advisors in the management of assets, and work to understand sometimes complex family situations, including assets and special tax-sensitive trust matters. We work closely with beneficiaries and co-trustees to provide financial and tax advice, including planning distributions. We communicate and review matters with beneficiaries. We prepare fiduciary income tax returns and generation-skipping returns.
Other Related Legal Services
In addition to advising private trustee offices, corporate fiduciaries, and others on the creation and management of fiduciary businesses, we work to continuously identify and manage fiduciary risks.
We work to avoid litigation. However, when disputes occur, we devise sound litigation strategies that include the negotiation of sophisticated settlement offers and agreements.
We advise non-profit and charitable organizations about the administration or implementation of planned giving strategies and programs, including the creation and maintenance of prized 501(c)(3) status, government and corporate issues, or federal and state regulations that apply to your nonprofit or charitable organization.
Contact Terry Spencer at TR Spencer Law Office in Sandy UT at (801) 566-1884 to learn more about how we can help you, your family, business, or organization now.