Probate in California - Alameda County Probate Lawyer
Should you have a will? Are you a good candidate for estate planning? What steps should you be taking now to ensure that your family is will be taken care of according to your wishes after you die?
If you’re nowhere near retirement age, you may be under the impression that estate planning is something you do when you get older. Wills, living trusts, powers of attorney and tax shelters – these are things usually of concern to those thinking about end of life decisions. It’s a subject that few of us like to consider but there are some very good reasons to start getting things in order long, long before you expect to leave this world. Whether you live in Oakland, Berkeley, Alameda, Albany, Piedmont, Pleasanton, San Leandro, Union City, Newark, Dublin, Emeryville, Fremont, Livermore, Hayward, or Castro Valley, a consultation with an Alameda County probate attorney can help define the issues that you should be considering. In general, though, estate planning is about far more than how your properties should be distributed after your death. Handled properly, trusts and other legal instruments can ensure that your property and assets are protected from taxes and used in the way that you want them used.
One of the most important functions of estate planning is to protect your assets from creditors and tax collection. There are many perfectly legal and ethical ways to shield assets and property from future creditors and to reduce or eliminate taxes on them. Those ways include trusts, family limited partnerships, annual gifts to childrenand grandchildren.
Say, for instance, that you and your Alameda County probate attorney decide that you should take advantage of the annual gift tax exclusion to move some of your assets out of your personal estate. Under the law, you and your spouse are each allowed to make a gift of cash or property up to a certain amount each year to each of your children that is excluded from taxation. With the right advice and counsel from an experienced probate attorney, you might choose to deposit that gift into a living trust with conditions that allow you to manage and direct its use. At first glance, the ability to make a gift of up to $12,000 per year to each of your children may seem like a strategy that would only be of use to the wealthy – or on the reverse, $12,000 may seem a small amount in relation to your entire estate.
Consider, though, the effects of creating a trust for each of your children when they – and you – are still young. The gifts that both you and your spouse make to that trust each year are excluded from taxation. If you start at age 30 and make the maximum gift to the trust every year until you reach retirement, the capital investment alone in that trust would be close to $400,000. If the trust has been managed properly, the trust could be worth well into the millions of dollars. And since those assets are already legally owned by your child, there will be no inheritance or estate taxes due, nor will your children have to deal with probate.
To explore legal ways of preserving your earnings for your heirs, contact an Alameda County Probate Lawyer for a consultation about estate planning and probate.
Probate Articles for California Cities
Probate Articles for California Counties
Looking For A Probate Lawyer In Your State?
