All too often, wealth planners focus only on the dollars. From annual monetary gifts to conditional clauses in inheritance documents, family wealth planning isn’t always flexible or broadly accessible to the everyday American family. Richard and Claudia explain the importance of factoring in the family’s “well-being” when considering generational wealth and inheritance tax.

With added flexibility, innovative wealth planning can benefit every family, not just the super wealthy.

In today’s episode of the Taxgirl podcast, Kelly is joined by Claudia Tordini and Richard S. Franklin to discuss a more modern approach to inheritance planning. Claudia draws on her background in business, art, and creativity to provide coaching and consulting services on family wealth and inheritance planning, leadership and team building, and creativity and innovation. Richard has practiced law as a trust and estates attorney for 30 years. His experience in working with wealthy families has been instrumental in informing his thinking and his work on behalf of Appanage on the broader subject of family wealth and inheritance tax conversations. Appanage supports wealth and inheritance planning for families across multiple generations.

Listen to Kelly, Claudia, and Richard talk about family wealth planning:

• How should planning differ from looking only at black-and-white dollar amounts? 
• Why is it important to incorporate your family’s well-being into your planning, on a qualitative level, not just quantitative?
• In terms of estate planning, how do you talk about things that are not dollar-driven to clients?
• With lengthening life expectancies, are clients open to handing over their “control” and wealth to younger generations earlier?
• Do clients often push back on getting on board with earlier inheritance planning?
• Can these kinds of programs scale?
• How a targeted transfer of wealth can significantly improve inheritors’ well-being earlier in life. 
• Why inheritance planning with well-being theory applies to every family, and not just the uber wealthy.
• Has the pandemic changed the way people approach wealth planning beyond life expectancy? 
• Why there’s a big focus on making gifts right now. 
• Rather than the classic advice of writing a check in December, how should clients open the conversation with intention regarding annual gifts with their family?
• Removing any negative or conditional language from wills according to recent research findings. 
• How philanthropy can factor into wellbeing and positive wealth planning.
• Estate planning has not always been about flexibility; does added flexibility improve the wellbeing of family members? 
• The impact of asking inheritor family members to rate their happiness in life on a scale of 1 to 10.
• What it means to have a “wellbeing trust.”

More about Kelly:

Kelly Phillips Erb created and hosts the Taxgirl podcast, your home for tax news, tax info, and tax policy. In each episode, she shares conversations about taxes, money, and the choices we make. Kelly is a tax attorney who works with taxpayers and tax practitioners like you every day. She helps folks out of tax jams, and hopefully, keeps others from getting into them.

You can find out more about Kelly here, and you can follow her on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn.

Kelly Phillips Erb created and hosts the Taxgirl podcast, your home for tax news, tax info, and tax policy. In each episode, she shares conversations about taxes, money, and the choices we make. Kelly is a tax attorney who works with taxpayers and tax practitioners like you every day. She helps folks out of tax jams, and hopefully, keeps others from getting into them.

You can find out more about Kelly here and you can follow her on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and Linkedin.

To subscribe to the podcast (it’s free!) using Apple, Spotify, or your favorite listening app, click here.

Links mentioned:

Kelly’s Website: Taxgirl
Richard & Claudia’s Website: Appanage Group