You are unique!  And your estate plan should reflect your special hopes, dreams, desires, and goals.  In the final analysis, your estate plan is the final testament to who you were in life.  It’s very personal and requires a very personal touch.  Estate planning is more than just a will, and it requires more than just an attorney.  It requires a financial professional, and no one is better qualified than your CPA. 

Estate planning, properly done, starts while you’re still relatively young and takes on different aspects over time.  Generally speaking, estate planning encompasses three phases:

1. Accumulation of an estate.  This occurs during your working years and involves establishing and meeting savings goals, and making contributions to tax advantaged retirement plans in order to accumulate an estate that will meet your needs after your working years are over.

2. Benefiting from your estate.  This occurs during your retirement years and involves proper management of your assets to produce the cash flow you need to enjoy a comfortable life in your senior years while preserving the amount of an estate you want to have left at the end of your life.

3. Passing your estate on to others.  This is the final plan that defines who the next beneficiaries of your estate will be and what you want to have happen to your estate after you’re finished with it.  This is the part of the overall estate planning process that ultimately gets memorialized in proper legal documents. 

Underlying all three phases is the common thread of proper tax planning—tax smart ways to accumulate your estate; tax smart ways to benefit from your estate; and tax smart ways to pass your estate on to others.

At Spectrum CPA Group, LLP, we add our experience in business consulting, retirement plan design and implementation, and wealth management to our experience in tax planning and, most importantly, our knowledge of you, to provide a comprehensive approach to estate planning that addresses all your needs and concerns.  We have the experience and know-how to give you the peace of mind that you’ll be able to live out your years in comfort and that those that follow you will be taken care of in the way you want.