The Practical Planner

Estate planning isn’t just about what happens after you die. It’s also about knowing how to best pass on your wealth during your lifetime, especially your children.

In this episode, hosts Thomas Kopelman and Dave Haughton discuss different ways to play for your children’s future. The explore various types of accounts, including UTMA accounts and 529 plans, detailing the pros and cons of each. They also discuss gifting, including how to help with large expenses like student loans and housing, and when to utilize trusts.

If you’ve wondered if your client needs a Credit Shelter Trust, this episode details their value in estate planning. Hosts Anne Rhodes, Thomas Kopelman and David Haughton discuss why Credit Shelter Trusts are designed for estate tax planning, specifically to preserve the estate tax exemption for spouses. They go into the different ways Credit Shelter Trusts can be structured and the potential downsides of using one. They also touch on Survivor’s Trusts and why flexibility in estate planning is so important.

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Dasarte Yarnway is well known throughout the wealth management community as the Founder of Yarnway Wealth Management and Head of Community at Altruist. In this episode, he joins co-hosts Thomas Kopelman and Dave Haughton to discuss his approach to holistic financial planning and why estate planning is the backbone of any financial plan.

He shares his RIITE (Retirement, Investment, Insurance, Taxes, Estate Plan) planning process with clients and how he educates his clients on why these are the critical pieces of a financial plan He also details how he coaches his own clients into knowing what they should be looking for in their financial plan and estate plans to empower them and deepen the client-advisor relationship.

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Gifting can be a great strategy to transfer wealth but the tax implications and exemptions are often misunderstood. Tax-free strategies for gifting to family or loved ones may actually be broader than most think. Hosts Thomas Kopelman and David Haughton discuss both the ways someone can gift as well as strategies for minimizing potential taxes on those gifts.

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Host Thomas Kopelman is joined by Dave Haughton, Senior Corporate Counsel at wealth.com, who’s stepping for Anne Rhodes as ongoing co-host temporarily, to discuss what happens after someone creates their estate planning documents. Dave details the three key steps to know, especially for advisors guiding their clients, including the critical piece of needing physical documents and getting them notarized—and why online notarization may not be the best solution.

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Anne and Thomas are joined again by Chris Nason, partner at McDermott, Will and Emery LLP, to discuss the intracacies of how trusts operate, focusing on SLATs an Marital Trusts. Chris dives deep into SLATs, how they work, the benefits of having one and when having one may make sense.

They also debunk a conversation that has been taking social media by storm about a certain trust structure that can help you avoid all taxes, and discuss why it's unlikely to work despite it going viral.

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Chris Nason, a partner at McDermott, Will and Emery LLP, who focuses on tax and estate planning, and Stanford University Trust and Estate Planning teacher, joins Anne and Thomas in this episode to provide some background on The Tax Cut and Jobs Act of 2017 and how advisors can help their clients create estate planning and tax strategies before it’s benefits are set to sunset at the end of 2025.

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Justin Castelli, Founder of RLS Wealth, joins hosts Anne Rhodes and Thomas Kopelman to talk about how his approach to financial planning has shifted to focus on life planning by placing a focus on his clients’ life goals and values at the center rather than focusing on the numbers first.

By helping clients figure out what their authentic life looks like and how to achieve it, he believes it brings more clarity to the estate planning process. Check out this episode to hear how he helps clients figure out what’s most important in their lives and how that helps them plan for what happens when they pass.

For any questions, email us at [email protected].

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Curious when it makes sense to have a Marital Trust? Hosts Anne Rhodes, Chief Legal Officer at [wealth.com](http://wealth.com) and Thomas Kopelman, Head of Community at wealth.com and Co-founder of AllStreet Wealth discuss the three main reasons to set one up, including:

- Concerns over how your spouse may use your assets

- Tax planning purposes, including the the generation-skipping transfer (GST) tax

- Asset protection

They dig into each reason and get into specifics of situations when having a Marital Trust can be beneficial.

Estate planning can be difficult due to tough conversations you may need to have and make. This can be exacerbated by certain cultural and generational expectations and taboos.

Anna N’jie-Konte, CFP®, President and Director of Financial Planning at Re-Envision Wealth, joins this episode to share how financial advisors can help their clients approach these conversations and why having them now can be beneficial for all their family and loved ones.