Case Details
- Client Name: Scott and Jessica (anonymized)
- Age: Early 50s (Scott) and Mid-40s (Jessica)
- Family Dynamics: Married couple with young children and extended family abroad
- Concerns: Guardianship planning, addressing estate tax exposure, and protecting assets from lawsuits and financial risks
Securing the Future for a Growing Family
Their Situation
Scott, a highly successful surgeon in his early 50s, and Jessica, in her mid-40s, had built substantial wealth through real estate investments and a growing portfolio. With two young children, their priority was ensuring financial security and proper care if something unexpected happened.
Jessica’s family lived abroad, making guardianship decisions more complex. They were also concerned about their exposure to estate taxes due to their rapidly growing wealth. Additionally, as a medical professional, Scott faced potential liability risks that could jeopardize their assets.
Despite recognizing some of their immediate planning needs, Scott and Jessica hesitated to pursue a fully comprehensive approach, leaving certain aspects of their plan incomplete. This left their assets vulnerable and key issues, such as long-term asset protection and professional wealth management, unaddressed.
Key Challenges
What Scott and Jessica Needed to Solve:
- Guardianship Planning: Identifying suitable guardians for their children across international borders while ensuring financial and emotional stability.
- Estate Tax Exposure: Rapidly growing wealth created significant estate tax liabilities, potentially diminishing their legacy.
- Asset Protection: Shielding their wealth from lawsuits and creditors while protecting their children’s inheritance from future risks like divorce or financial mismanagement.
- Comprehensive Wealth Management: Ensuring that wealth is managed by qualified fiduciaries to sustain and grow their legacy.
Inspired Solutions
How Legacy Engineering™ Would Address These Challenges:
Scott and Jessica’s case illustrates the importance of building a comprehensive legacy plan that fully addresses the needs of young families with growing wealth. Their experience inspired several critical components of Legacy Engineering™:
- Visioning as a Foundation: Scott and Jessica understood their immediate needs for estate planning, guardianship, and tax mitigation. However, without visioning, they did not fully appreciate the importance of protecting and managing their wealth over time. Visioning would have helped them align their decisions with long-term goals, including asset protection, professional fiduciary management, and proactive tax strategies.
- Asset Protection Structures: Legacy Engineering™ would include trusts and legal structures to shield their wealth from liability risks, lawsuits, and creditors while ensuring their children’s inheritance is protected from future mishaps.
- Mandatory Trust Funding: Legacy Engineering™ ensures trust funding is a mandatory step to protect every client’s estate and maintain alignment with their goals.
- Proactive Wealth Management: By integrating professional fiduciary services and governance structures, Legacy Engineering™ empowers clients to sustain and grow their legacy through qualified management and oversight.
Why This Matters
The Legacy Engineering™ Difference:
Scott and Jessica’s story emphasizes the importance of creating a holistic, proactive legacy plan that addresses immediate concerns while preparing for the future. Their challenges highlighted the need for visioning as a critical first step to align decisions with long-term goals and for implementing mandatory trust funding to ensure assets are properly protected. Their case inspired the development of Legacy Engineering™, a framework that integrates estate planning, asset protection, tax strategies, and professional wealth management into a cohesive process. By taking a proactive and comprehensive approach, Legacy Engineering™ ensures young families like Scott and Jessica’s are prepared for every stage of their journey.
Disclaimer: This case study is inspired by real client experiences that shaped the development of Legacy Engineering™. While anonymized and modified to protect privacy, it illustrates how the methodology addresses challenges like those faced by this client.