Estate planning

What is Estate Planning?

Estate planning, as the name suggests, is the process of planning what will happen to a person’s assets should they pass away or become incapacitated and unable to manage their affairs on their own.

Estate planning also includes the consideration of a person’s legal, tax, and personal objectives, such as setting up a trust and the custody of young children.

But having an estate plan, which is especially important for wealthy people, is an ongoing process and, at the same time, quite an expensive one.

What is the difference between writing a will and estate planning?

The biggest and most significant difference between having a will and estate planning is that the will is one of the tools in the estate planning process.

The will determines what will happen to your assets, such as real estate, cash, savings, company stocks, bonds, shares, cryptocurrencies, and ETFs.

What are the main steps in estate planning?

Catalog your assets and debts
In this preparatory step, you need to make a full inventory of all your assets and liabilities. Keep the summary of the inventory, together with the important original documents, in a secure place.

Develop a contingency plan
Develop a documented plan that includes a strategy to control what would happen to your assets and real estate if you passed away.

Protect your children
Detail your provision for your children under the age of 18 and those from previous marriages.

Protect your assets
If you aim to manage the tax consequences of your assets, a trust may be beneficial to you. As an asset protection tool, you can successfully use a last will and testament.

Review your beneficiaries
Make sure that you have designated the right beneficiaries to your assets. People sometimes forget important details.

Appoint your fiduciaries
Every perfect plan needs to be executed. Fiduciaries, such as trustees, executors, or guardians, have to be appointed, be notified, and agree to their appointment.

Plan to reassess
Everything changes in our lives, including plans. Make sure that you regularly revise your estate plan, especially after important changes in your circumstances.

What are the four most important aspects of estate planning?

Estate planning is a prolonged and sometimes expensive process. But what happens if you don’t have one? Or if you have no official expression of your will regarding your assets after you pass away?

There will be consequences for your loved ones, ranging from minor inconveniences to enormous levels of stress, on top of the grief they will experience.

The four most important considerations in estate planning are these:

Create an estate plan that removes the stress and worry from family members.
Optimize it to reduce capital gains tax and inheritance taxes.
Make sure that it protects your assets from the Probate Court.
Plan in a way that will avoid or minimize disputes and contestation.

In summary, estate planning reduces the stress and burden on your loved ones. The better organized your estate planning is, the better protected your loved ones will be.

When should I start estate planning?

Some financial advisors say that you should initiate an estate plan as soon as you reach a legal age. While it is probably true that it is never too early to take the first step, you probably don’t need estate planning while you are in your early twenties.

As the main purpose of estate planning is to protect your assets and your loved ones, it makes sense to start thinking of an estate plan once you have acquired your first assets, not when you reach a legal age.

No matter when you start with your estate planning, it’s important to remember that it has to be regularly updated. Develop a habit of checking and updating your estate plan whenever major events happen in your life. Events that should trigger a revision of your estate plan are:

A change in your marital status
A new job
New real estate
A new member of the family
A recent death in the family
Newly acquired digital assets

DGLegacy and Estate Planning

How does DGLegacy help you to prepare your estate plan?

With DGLegacy, you can easily catalog your assets, which enables you to protect not only them but your loved ones too in the case of an unforeseen event happening to you.

You are able to catalog your digital, financial, and non-financial assets, designate your preferred beneficiaries, and have them notified at the time you choose – while ensuring that your executor will know where to find your important documents.

With DGLegacy, you can protect all types of assets. Your secure document and password manager with digital inheritance also makes it easy for you to keep your list of assets and beneficiaries up to date.

This way, in the event of anything unforeseen happening to you, your loved ones:

Are aware of your assets
Can identify and locate your assets
Can minimize the chance of unclaimed assets.

This is achieved with the following easy steps:

Catalog assets and passwords

Designate beneficiaries and trustees

Detecting if something happens to you

Informing your loved ones about the assigned assets and passwords

Support for your loved ones

Catalog assets and passwords

You catalog the assets and passwords that you want to protect via DGLegacy, with the minimum basic information about the assets that will allow your beneficiaries to identify and locate them.

We don’t ask for confidential information such as your bank account number, the value of your stock options, or financial account numbers!

Next step

Designate beneficiaries and trustees

Beneficiaries are the people whom you appoint to be informed about the assets and passwords that you assign to them. These are usually your partner, your children or your extended family members, such as siblings and parents.

You can choose whether the beneficiaries are to be notified at the time you create the asset or only in the case of an unforeseen event.

If your beneficiaries are, for example, elderly people or children, they might not be proficient with the type of assets assigned to them. In that case, we recommend that you assign trustees for each of your assets. If something happens to you, they can help the beneficiaries to locate their assigned assets and claim ownership.

Next step

Heartbeat protocol

The custom-engineered Heartbeat protocol of DGLegacy verifies that you are OK and detects whether anything unforeseen has happened to you.

It is a safe procedure which also aims to eliminate the possibility of false detections of unforeseen events at any cost.

This is implemented through a multistep process, described on the How It Works page.

Next step

Heartbeat protocol triggering (unforeseen event detection)

If there is no confirmation in response to any of the reminder emails or phone calls, part of the Heartbeat protocol, the system detects that an unforeseen event has happened to you.

Then the notifications which you have configured into the system about the catalogued assets and the associated beneficiaries and trustees are triggered.

Next step

Support for your loved ones

Our ultimate goal is to provide you with the right service to protect your assets and secure your loved ones’ inheritance.

Our team of experts worked with a renowned law firm to offer additional protection for your loved ones through the legal package “Guide and Inform”, part of the Platinum subscription.

In the case of an unforeseen event, the law company will engage with the beneficiaries to guide and help them in the process of claiming the assets you’ve assigned to them.