If you have enjoyed financial success and you are getting remarried as a parent, there are naturally going to be some estate planning concerns. You want to provide for your new spouse appropriately, but you also want to protect the inheritances that you intend to leave to your children. How do you satisfy both of these aims simultaneously?
Before we explain the widely embraced solution, we should emphasize the value of a prenuptial agreement. Clearly, when you are willing to marry someone, you have high hopes. Statistically speaking, most second marriages do not last, and the likelihood of failure gets higher for subsequent marriages.
You may say “this will never happen to us,” but all of these people that have gone through multiple divorces probably felt the same way. A prenuptial agreement is not necessarily a romance killer. It is simply a way for each party to protect themselves given the fact that the future is always going to be uncertain.
Qualified Terminable Interest Property (QTIP) Trusts
An estate planning device that is often used by people that are getting remarried is the qualified terminable interest property (QTIP) trust. The way that it works is you fund the trust, and your spouse would be the first beneficiary. You make your children the successor beneficiaries of the trust.
When you execute the trust declaration, you name a trustee to act as the administrator. If you do in fact predecease your spouse, the trustee would be able to distribute the earnings from the trust to your spouse. You would also have the latitude to instruct the trustee to distribute portions of the principal if this is your choice.
Your surviving spouse would be provided for throughout his or her life, but the terms of the trust would be set in stone. After the death of your spouse, your children would inherit assets that remain in the trust.
Explore Our Special Reports
We go the extra mile to provide many different resources for our clients in every way that we can. First off, this website is a treasure trove of very useful information about important elder law and estate planning topics.
Our attorneys have developed a library of special reports that provide detailed information, but they are easy for laypeople to understand. There is no charge for the reports, and you can access any or all of them right now. To do just that, visit our special reports page and click on the topics that are of interest to you.
Attend a Free Seminar
In addition to the written materials that we offer, we get out into the community to hold estate planning and elder law seminars. We get very positive feedback from attendees, and it is gratifying to be able to pass along information that is useful to our neighbors throughout the Los Angeles area.
There are a number of dates on the schedule at the present time, and we urge you to attend the session that works for you. We do not charge for admission, but we do ask that you register in advance, because space is limited. You can do just that if you visit our seminar page.
Take Action Today!
We are here to help if you would like to discuss your estate planning objectives with a licensed attorney. Clearly, it can be disconcerting to discuss personal and financial matters with someone that you have just met, but we do everything possible to put our clients at ease from the start.
You can send us a message to request a consultation appointment, and we can be reached by phone at 310-337-7696 or 562-346-3209.
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