Estate Planning
Estate planning is about more than deciding who will receive your assets after your death. A properly designed estate plan can help protect you and your family during your lifetime, provide for the people you care about, preserve the assets you have worked to acquire, and ensure that your wishes are carried out when you are no longer able to make decisions for yourself.
At Mavros Panagos Law, we understand that every individual and family has different needs, concerns and goals. Whether you need a straightforward will and advance directives or a more comprehensive estate plan involving trusts, asset protection or long-term care planning, we will work with you to develop a plan tailored to your particular circumstances.
At MPL, we prepare both simple and complex wills and trusts, including revocable and irrevocable trusts, supplemental needs trusts, Medicaid asset protection trusts, and trusts for minor beneficiaries. We can also review your existing estate plan to determine whether it continues to reflect your wishes and whether changes in your family, finances or the law make an update appropriate.
Planning for You and Your Family
A well-crafted estate plan should address not only what happens after your death, but also what happens if you become ill or incapacitated during your lifetime. We work closely with our clients to understand what is most important to them. That may include providing for a spouse or children, protecting a beneficiary with special needs, avoiding probate, preserving assets against the potential cost of long-term care, addressing estate tax concerns or simply making the administration of an estate easier for loved ones.
Our goal is to create an estate plan that accomplishes your objectives while remaining practical, understandable and appropriate for your individual circumstances.
Wills and Trusts
Wills and trusts can serve very different purposes, and the appropriate estate plan will depend upon the needs of the individual and family. At MPL, we can help you determine which planning tools are appropriate for you and how they should work together. Depending upon your circumstances and objectives, your estate plan may include a will, one or more trusts, beneficiary planning and documents designed to address incapacity and medical decision making.
We can also help clients who already have an estate plan in place. Estate planning should not necessarily be viewed as something you do once and never revisit. Changes in your family, assets, health and long-term goals may make it appropriate to review your documents periodically and determine whether they still accomplish what you intended.
Planning for Incapacity
An important part of estate planning is making sure that trusted individuals have the legal authority to assist you if you become unable to manage your own affairs. Our office prepares powers of attorney, health care proxies and living wills and can advise clients regarding advance health care planning. These documents can allow you to designate individuals you trust to assist with financial and health care decisions and provide guidance concerning your wishes if you are unable to communicate them yourself.
Planning ahead can also help families avoid uncertainty during an already difficult time by making your wishes clear and identifying the people you want to act on your behalf.
Protecting What You Have Built
For many of our clients, estate planning also means protecting the assets they have spent a lifetime acquiring. Whether your goal is to preserve assets, avoid probate, plan for potential long-term care needs, reduce potential estate tax exposure, protect an inheritance for a beneficiary or provide for the orderly transfer of wealth to the next generation, we will discuss the available strategies and develop an estate plan that reflects your priorities.
Estate planning is personal. There is no single plan that is right for every individual or every family. At Mavros Panagos Law, our goal is to listen first, understand what matters to you, and then create an estate plan designed to protect you, your family and everything you have worked to build.
Whether you are creating an estate plan for the first time or reviewing documents prepared years ago, we can help ensure that your plan continues to reflect your wishes and accomplish your goals.