Estate Planning

The clients I work with on estate planning rarely come in because they’re worried about taxes. They come in because something happened – a friend’s parent died and the family ended up in a years-long fight over the will; a child got married and they realized they have no idea what would happen to their assets if both spouses died in the same accident; a parent started showing signs of cognitive decline and they understood for the first time that incapacity planning is as important as death planning. The trigger is usually a moment of clarity about what could go wrong for the people they love.

I’m Lawrence Israeloff. I’m an estate planning attorney, a CPA, and a Certified Financial Planner™, and I’ve been doing this work for families across Long Island and the New York City metro for over two decades. The first job in any estate planning engagement is to listen carefully – to understand the family, the assets, the worries, and the things the client hasn’t articulated yet. The legal documents come after that conversation, not before.

The phrase “estate plan” is sometimes used as if it means a will. It doesn’t. A working estate plan is a coordinated set of documents and decisions that address what happens to a person and their assets across several different scenarios:

A typical estate plan for a family with moderate complexity includes several documents that work together:

For families with business interests, the plan also coordinates with business succession planning – the question of who will own and run the business after the founder steps back, which is its own substantial topic and often the most complicated part of the estate planning conversation.

Estate planning sits at the intersection of three disciplines. The legal side is about what the documents say and whether they hold up. The tax side is about whether the plan minimizes the federal and state taxes that would otherwise reduce what passes to the family. The financial planning side is about how the plan interacts with retirement assets, investment accounts, insurance, and the client’s broader picture during their lifetime.

Most clients have a separate attorney, CPA, and financial advisor who don’t talk to each other. The result is plans where the legal documents look fine in isolation but don’t coordinate with the rest of the picture – beneficiary designations that contradict the will, retirement account distributions that create unexpected income tax bills, charitable strategies that don’t optimize across income tax and estate tax, gifts that use the wrong assets at the wrong time. Bringing the three disciplines together is most of what I do.

Plans drafted at one stage of life often don’t fit later stages. Births, deaths, marriages, divorces, moves to a different state, significant changes in assets, the sale or formation of a business, or major changes in tax law all create reasons to revisit a plan. As a general rule, plans should be reviewed every three to five years even if nothing has obviously changed. I see plans regularly where the named guardian for minor children no longer makes sense because the children are now adults, or where the trustee named for a contingent trust has died, or where the estate has grown enough that tax planning is now relevant in a way it wasn’t before.

I work out of Melville, NY and serve families across Long Island, the five boroughs, Westchester, and the broader New York metro. New York’s estate planning landscape has its own particular features – the lower state estate tax exemption with the steep “cliff” provision, the specific procedures of each county’s Surrogate’s Court, the state’s recently-updated power of attorney statute, and a body of trust and estate law distinct from neighboring states. For families with property or family ties in more than one state, the planning gets more complicated and benefits from careful coordination. Useful starting points if you want to read on your own: the American Bar Association’s estate planning resources, the IRS estate tax page, and the National Association of Estate Planners & Councils. None of those replace planning tied to your specific family.

If something has happened recently (a friend’s hard estate situation, a health concern, a child reaching an important age, a change in your assets) that’s typically when this conversation makes sense. The work itself is rarely as complicated as people fear. Most clients come away from a first meeting with a clearer sense of what they actually need and how to get it done. Schedule a consultation and we’ll work through where you are.