You likely know what estate planning is and why it is so important to have an estate plan in place. Do you, however, know what legacy planning is? The idea behind the concept of legacy planning is to take estate planning to the next level. 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 Oklahoma City legacy planning attorneys at Parman & Easterday explain the benefits of legacy planning.
Traditional Estate Planning vs. Legacy 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. Using 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.
What Is Your Legacy?
Take a moment to think about the legacy you hope to pass down to your children, grandchildren, and even great-grandchildren. What are the ideals and beliefs that have guided you throughout your lifetime? 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 pro-active approach by including a trust 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 an Oklahoma City Legacy Planning Attorney
For additional information, please join us for an upcoming FREE seminar. If you have questions or concerns about legacy planning, contact the experienced Oklahoma City legacy planning attorneys at Parman & Easterday by calling 405-843-6100 to schedule your appointment today.
If you are a person of faith, your religious beliefs have also undoubtedly played an important role in your life and in the decisions you have made over the course of your lifetime. If you want to pass down your faith, there are ways to incorporate it as well into your legacy plan.
Absolutely. You might want to create a charitable trust, for example, as part of your legacy plan if philanthropy is important to you.
No. By working with your estate planning attorney you can incorporate legacy planning tools and strategies into your existing estate plan.
Since founding Parman & Easterday in 1985, Larry has led over 1,000 free, community-service education programs and helped more than 10,000 Oklahoma families go from putting off their estate plan to getting it done. His goal for every client is the same: to become the person their family calls "the one who took care of everything."
Larry is the author of three books: The Straight Shooter's Guide to Estate Planning; Estate Planning Basics; and Guiding Those Left Behind in Oklahoma. He served as Oklahoma's Secretary of State and Secretary of Commerce, and his firm is the only member of the American Academy of Estate Planning Attorneys in the state.
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