Estate Planning

If you are like most people, you have spent a considerable amount of time and energy accumulating the wealth needed to provide a comfortable lifestyle for yourself and your family. As the years pass, however, your focus starts to shift to how to ensure that your loved ones can maintain that lifestyle after you're gone.

Hutchinson Financial can work with you to develop a solid, effective estate plan that ensures that your hard-earned wealth will pass intact to your intended beneficiaries, instead of being siphoned off to government processes and bureaucrats. Without an estate plan, you lose the opportunity to protect your family from an impersonal, complex governmental process that is a burden at best and can be a nightmare. The most common methods of estate planning are:

• Wills are the most basic of estate planning documents. First introduced in medieval England, wills direct a court as to how a deceased person wanted to distribute money and property. Everyone who is concerned about how their estate will be divided should, at the very least, have a current and valid will.
• Living Trusts have become increasingly popular over the last two decades. Once considered as a tool just for the rich, Living Trusts are now among the most common estate planning tools. This legal arrangement, usually drafted by an estate attorney, creates a separate entity called a Living Trust—as opposed to a "testamentary" trust created after death.

While some estate planners favor wills and others prefer a Living Trust as the estate plan of choice, all agree that everyone should have an estate plan.