Hopefully, you already know what estate planning is and why it is important to have an estate plan in place; however, you may not know what legacy planning is or why you may also want to include it in your estate plan. Legacy planning allows you to incorporate your ideals, beliefs, values, and faith into your estate planning endeavors. Instead of simply leaving behind assets, legacy planning lets you leave behind much more of who you are and what made you the person you were during your lifetime. The Los Angeles legacy planning attorneys at Schomer Estate & Wealth Advisors explain how to include legacy planning in your estate plan.
How Is Legacy Planning Different from Traditional Estate Planning?
A traditional estate plan focuses on the distribution of estate assets after death. Your estate assets may include real or personal property as well as tangible and intangible assets. Those assets, however, all represent the material wealth you have accumulated over the course of your lifetime. With traditional estate planning methods, there is no place for deeply held values, ideals, and beliefs that may be just as important to you as those assets – even more important for many people. Traditional estate planning remains important, of course, because you do need a roadmap that can be used to distribute your material wealth when you die. You also need a plan that determines who will control those assets and who will make decisions for you should you become incapacitated at some point in the future. All of that can be addressed in a traditional estate plan. What is not addressed in a traditional estate plan are the values, morals, faith, and beliefs that guided you throughout your lifetime and helped you achieve the material success you have achieved. For that, you need to turn the legacy planning. Legacy planning does not require you to create a separate plan. Instead, legacy planning simply takes traditional estate planning one step further by incorporating tools and strategies aimed at including the legacy you wish to leave behind for future generations.
Passing Down Your Legacy
Most of us hope to pass down more than material assets to our children, grandchildren, and even great-grandchildren. Those intangible things make up your legacy. When contemplating your legacy, ask some of the following questions:
- What are the ideals and beliefs that have guided you throughout your lifetime?
- Is faith important to you?
- Do you have a philosophy that has guided you through life?
- What is important to you?
- How can that legacy shape future generations?
Once you know what legacy you want to pass down, it is time to weave that legacy into your estate plan. Your legacy planning attorney will help you do just that by using a wide variety of strategies and tools. A Letter of Instruction is a simple and straightforward way to include legacy planning in your estate plan by putting down in writing what you want future generations to know and understand about the beliefs and values that shaped your life. You may also decide to take a more proactive approach by including a trust agreement in your legacy plan. A trust allows you to create terms that can directly reflect your values and beliefs. For example, the trust terms may stipulate that the assets held in the trust may only be used to pay for educational expenses incurred by beneficiaries. You might even require beneficiaries to attend a specific school or pursue a select area of higher education, such as medicine or law.
Contact Los Angeles Legacy Planning Attorneys
For more information, please join us for an upcoming FREE seminar. If you have additional questions or concerns about how to include legacy planning in your estate plan, contact the experienced Los Angeles legacy planning attorneys at Schomer Estate & Wealth Advisors by calling (310) 337-7696 to schedule an appointment.
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