The Estate Planning Team at Family Estate Planning Law Group • Lynnfield

At Family Estate Planning Law Group, we work closely with other professional advisors, including Certified Financial Planner™ Practitioners, investment advisors, financial consultants, insurance professionals, Certified Public Accountants, and tax advisors as part of the estate planning team. We believe the team approach provides our mutual clients with the most comprehensive, realistic and effective estate plan.

Our Approach

Our approach is to provide our clients with a Personal Information Form. We ask our clients to fill out the Personal Information Form to the best of their ability and bring it along to the initial meeting. There is no charge for our initial meeting and in most cases, we will be able to help design a plan that will take care of families the way our clients intend.

At the initial meeting, we get to know the client and educate them about our unique updating process designed to take care of families when it really matters. We educate the client on the status of the current plan and make recommendations consistent with their goals and wishes. We will then quote a flat price for the services we will provide. We will not bill by the hour. If someone sees the value in our process, they can hire us. If they do not, we ask they do not.

After we design the plan, there is ongoing communication with the client, which may involve obtaining additional documentation, clarifying goals and information, and discussing options and tradeoffs. We use all appropriate avenues of communication: phone, email, and in-person meetings. We firmly believe that ongoing communication is an essential element of developing an effective plan and building a life-long relationship with our clients.

We also believe that no client should sign any document without a comprehensive understanding of its content and the ramifications. We provide our clients with a detailed graph of their plan for discussion purposes and dedicate a significant amount of time to the signing of documents. It allows us to explain the plan and answer any questions that have come up in the process.

Once documents are signed, we work directly with our clients, or with you, or both, to align, verify and track the assets they own and ensure they align with the estate plan. Some refer to this as funding, but we view this as an ongoing process that requires monitoring so that at the time of death or disability, our clients assets will pass in a manner considered most advantageous to their family.

All our clients are part of our ongoing client maintenance program. We maintain an ongoing relationship with and representation of our clients so that their plan is kept up to date, assets are aligned, verified, and tracked, and family and legal changes are communicated and the plan adjusted so the family will be taken care of at the time of death or disability. In our experience, simply reminding our clients to update resulted in very few effective plans. Those in our maintenance program actively communicate on an ongoing basis with us to make sure the plan is up to date. Together, we plan for life.® Together, we take care of families when it really matters.

Resources

  • Client Education
    Please visit our blog for an online library of articles on issues related to estate planning. We have posted a number of articles suitable for use as hand-outs to your clients.
  • Joint Marketing
    We are happy to work with you to speak to your clients or prospects on estate planning issues, including basic estate planning, charitable giving strategies, generation-skipping and other advanced topics, business succession, or asset protection. Please call the office if you would like to plan a workshop or a “Client Appreciation Event.”
  • Weekly Blog Digest
    Each week we produce an electronic blog digest, on estate planning issues, for professional advisors like yourself. You may subscribe online and we will add you to our weekly e-mail list.