Mr. Lanigan's estate planning encompasses complex estates often worth millions of dollars and often consisting of family owned businesses, life insurance, Qualified Subchapter S Trusts, Electing Small Business Trusts, deferred compensation plans, minors’ trusts (to hold gifts from parents and grandparents), and charitable interests, exposure to creditors, multiple generations, generation-skipping transfers, IRA’s and other retirement plans, second marriages, non-U.S. citizenship, mental disabilities, and other complicating factors.
Mr. Lanigan has written a wide variety of wills, revocable living trusts, irrevocable life insurance trusts, asset protection trusts, living QTIP trusts, traditional split-dollar agreements; private split-dollar agreements, charitable remainder trusts, minors’ gift trusts, family limited partnership agreements, durable powers of attorney, designations of health care surrogates, shareholder buy/sell agreements, and other contracts to implement his clients' estate plans.
What is Estate Planning?
1. Estate planning is a process by which a person or a couple:
a. considers all of their assets, liabilities, income, and expenses;
b. identifies one or more persons to serve as their surrogate for making health care decisions at any time that they cannot do so themselves;
c. identifies one or more persons to serve as their agent to manage their property at any time that they are unable to do so; identifies to whom they wants their property to go during life and after death (i.e., family members, charities, etc);
d. decides when these beneficiaries are to receive their property and in what amounts; arranges for management of assets in trust for one or more beneficiaries who are not old enough or informed enough or frugal enough to manage assets left to them by a parent, grandparent, or other ancestor;
e. analyzes how to avoid or at least minimize all taxes, both federal and state, that could be imposed upon their death or upon making a gift;
f. considers their own health and the health and abilities of every person on whom they rely to serve as personal representative (i.e., executor/executrix), trustee, surrogate, agent;
g. considers life insurance, whether to buy it or retain it, how to “own: it, how to fund the premium; whether to hold it in an irrevocable trust;
h. considers business entities they owns and how to value them and whether to retain or transfer control; and
i. arranges their assets and liabilities so that a judgment creditor, if any, would have difficulty collecting on a judgment.
2. Implementing these decisions is done via several different types of documents, including:
a. A last will and testament;
b. A trust, either
1. Revocable, to work with the will; or
ii. Irrevocable, to accomplish various goals;
c. A designation of health care surrogate;
d. A durable power of attorney;
e. A “living will”;
f. A HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996) designation;
g. A pre-need designation of guardian;
h. perhaps a shareholders’ agreement or buy-out provisions in a limited liability company operating agreement;
i. perhaps a pre-marital agreement;
j. perhaps a domestic partner agreement, for an unmarried couple or a same sex couple
What kinds of estate planning do I do?
1. Estate tax, gift tax, and generation-skipping transfer tax planning
2. Wealth preservation planning
3. Business succession planning
4. Special needs trust designing, such as for a mentally retarded or otherwise disabled child or to account for potential need for Medicaid
5. Unmarried couples and same sex couples planning
