Senior estate planning can be a confusing subject, but CLA USA, a financial services company, has been helping seniors and retirees make sense of their financial planning for more than 20 years. If you’re like most seniors, your financial planning up to this point has focused on building a nest egg for your retirement.
The aggressive strategies most often recommended for retirement accounts are great at building wealth and value in your IRA or other retirement accounts. However, 0nce you’ve reached retirement age, it is vital to shift your financial investment and planning strategies from building wealth to preserving wealth by reducing or eliminating risk. CLA USA promotes a low to no-risk, conservative strategies aimed at asset protection and estate preservation. Most seniors haven’t thought beyond retirement and planning to have enough money to retire on – estate planning isn’t even on their radar. There are a number of important reasons that senior estate planning is important, though. The following questions and answers can help you get started thinking about how estate planning can help you preserve your assets and ensure that you will have the assets in place when needed.
Will I Have to Pay Taxes on My Social Security?
Only a CPA can tell you whether you’ll owe taxes on your social security income and how much it will be. If you work or have a fairly substantial amount of other income, however, you may have to pay some taxes on your social security. There are ways to position your assets and reduce the amount of taxes you’ll owe. That’s part of the estate planning you should be doing.
What Are the Advantages of a Living Trust?
A living trust essentially allows you to transfer title of your assets of some or all of your assets while retaining control and use of them throughout your lifetime. This can be valuable way to protect your assets and your estate while still allowing you access to them to pay for your needs. In addition, because the assets in your trust are owned by the trust and not by you, the process of transferring control of them upon your death or incapacitation is much simpler than going through probate with a will.
What About Insurance Benefits?
There are many different types of insurance you should consider, including life insurance, Â annuities, long term care insurance and catastrophic illness insurance – and many different variations of each that can be most advantageous to you, depending on your circumstances.
A CLA USA financial services consultant can answer your questions and help you understand the benefits, advantages and drawbacks of the various financial instruments designed to make senior estate planning easier.
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