What to Expect From (and How to Prepare For) an Initial Estate Planning Meeting With Your Personal Family Lawyer.

Whether you’ve met with an estate planning attorney before or it’s your first time, it’s important to understand how working with a Personal Family Lawyer® is different than meeting with a traditional lawyer.

This article will explain what’s involved with such a consultation, and it may even inspire you to meet with us to get your estate planning started or updated. If you do decide to meet with us, I’ll share instructions on how you can do that, plus include a free offer at the end of this article to give you extra motivation to check us out.

Given our unique approach, an initial consultation with our office is quite different than an initial consultation with a typical estate planning attorney. A typical “initial consultation” would be a meet-and-greet-type of meeting in which the lawyer tells you the documents you need to put in place and quotes you a fee to provide those documents.

In such a meeting, however, it will likely be difficult for you to know exactly what you need for your unique family situation and how to make the right decision, outside of simply considering whether the cost of these documents fits within your budget or not. Unfortunately, deciding what you need based solely on the cost of documents will likely lead you to make choices that won’t actually serve and protect your family and assets.

In contrast, our initial meeting with you is a two-hour working session, called a Family Wealth Planning Session™. Prior to the Family Wealth Planning Session, we’ll send you a personalized package of materials that will guide you in locating and listing each of your assets.

What we consistently see is that surprisingly, many people do not have a clear awareness of what they own or where to find their assets. This is the reason there are more than $58 Billion (yes, Billion with a “B”) of lost and unclaimed assets held by state and federal agencies. Oftentimes people become incapacitated or die, and their family simply overlooks these assets.

We know you haven’t devoted years of your precious time and energy to build your family wealth only for your heirs to lose track of it when something happens to you. That’s one reason the Family Wealth Planning Session is so beneficial. Whether you decide to create a full plan or just redesign the one you have, at the very least your family will know what you have and how to locate it should anything happen to you.

Also during your Family Wealth Planning Session, we’ll guide you through a complete understanding of what would happen to everyone you love and everything you own should something happen to you—whether it’s under your current plan or the plan the state has for you if you don’t have an estate plan yet. From there, you can decide if that plan is how you want things handled or if you’d want a different outcome, in which case we can design a plan to ensure things go exactly the way you want in your absence.

Finally, if you do decide to create a plan or redesign an existing one, you can select the type of plan you want based on the different packages we’ve created, which allow you to literally choose your fee based on what’s most important to you, what’s not important to you, and with a clear understanding of the impact of your choices.

The Family Wealth Planning Session is a true educational opportunity for you to ensure you’re doing the right thing by your loved ones. This investment of your time now will save your family countless hours of heartache and work down the road, while also keeping them out of conflict and out of court.

Unfortunately, death is unavoidable. But you can make it far easier on the people you love by the choices you make now. And facing the reality of this fact today allows you to make choices that will let you enjoy your life even more. Indeed, our clients report a huge level of relief after meeting with us, and they frequently say they wished they’d done it sooner.

We’d love to meet with you for a Family Wealth Planning Session. Normally, we charge $750 for these working sessions, but if you’re one of the first five families to schedule this month, you commit to doing the homework ahead of time, and you secure your Session with a credit card (which won’t be charged as long as you do your part), we’ll waive that Planning Session fee.

Simply give us a call to get scheduled. Or if you have a relative or friend who’d benefit by getting their affairs in order, pass along this article and tell them to call us. It’s our mission to keep the families in our community out of court and out of conflict, and it all starts with a Family Wealth Planning Session. Because, really, your family IS worth it.