The SMART Estate Planning Process

Estate Planning is important in ensuring that your wishes are met both during your lifetime, and after your death. Your Estate Plan ensures that upon your death, your assets will be managed and transferred in the most financially efficient and tax-effective way to the people you wish to benefit.

An Estate Plan includes your Estate Briefing paper, Wills, Testamentary Trusts, EPOA and asset protection tailored to your situation. Your assets may include property, shares, superannuation, insurances or valuables.

In short, an Estate Plan formalises your wishes in writing, and ensures there is no uncertainty on how you would like your assets handled.

As accountants & financial advisors we are best placed to truly understand your personal and business structure to discuss with you your wishes, identify tax efficient strategies for your estate planning, and ensure this is all correctly articulated to a lawyer so that your Will truly reflects your intentions.

We also know when we ask clients if they have a Will, or how old is the existing Will, that they have the best intentions of actioning. The reality is, life gets busy and the complex administrative side of preparing such paperwork can mean important things fall off the 'to do list'.

We aim to streamline this process and make it happen for you to ensure you and your family are protected

To make a well-rounded and complete Estate Plan, we need to gather detailed information from you. If you already do your Financial Planning with us, this process will be quick and relatively straight forward as we will already have much of the information at hand.

We will send you a video to explain the process and assist you in what to consider when completing our Estate Planning Questionnaire.
Once we have the detailed information from you, we can continue onto Step 2 of the Estate Planning Process.

Using your questionnaire responses we will produce an interactive Family Tree Diagram and Entity Diagram (personal, joint, super, family trust & companies) and the assets within each entity. We will meet with you in person or via zoom, and discuss your wishes on how you want your estate to be divided. We'll then show you real-time how this will look based on your wishes to ensure your intentions flow through to the right people. We can make live changes with you and show you how this flows down your family tree and assets.

In this meeting, we'll ensure we have addressed all the assets that need to be included in your Estate Plan. We'll present a personalised
Estate Briefing Paper for you to take to your own lawyer, or to work with our lawyer to confirm your Estate Plan meets all the legal requirements to ensure a water-tight strategy.

We understand that having conversations of this nature can seem heavy. We'll work collaboratively with you to ensure we leave no stone unturned to ensure a complete and well-considered Estate Plan.

SAMPLE FAMILY TREE DIAGRAM	SAMPLE ENTITY DIAGRAM

Using the Estate Briefing Paper the lawyer will draft your Will, Testamentary Trust, EPOA’s and relevant documents.

If using our lawyer, we will arrange a Zoom conference with you and the lawyer to allow the lawyer to obtain any final instructions relating to the documents.

Your Estate Plan is not official until all documents are signed by yourself, your lawyer / solicitor and us.

The final documents will be sent by the lawyer to you for review.

Another Zoom meeting will then be arranged for final signing and witnessing.