The Family Protection Report

You leave your Strategic Planning Session with a written report about your family. Not a brochure — a document built from your own information, and yours to keep whether or not you hire us.

Most firms hand you a proposal. We hand you an analysis. Before your Session, we spend more than an hour turning what you told us in your intake into a Family Protection Report: where your family stands today, what is exposed, and what we would do about it. It is waiting for you when you arrive.

Where you stand today

The report opens with your assets and, more importantly, how each one is titled. This is the part most people have never seen laid out in one place.

Titling — not your will — decides whether an asset reaches your family smoothly or gets caught in probate. A house, a bank account and a retirement account can each pass a completely different way, and people are often surprised which of theirs would end up in front of a judge.

What doing nothing would cost

Then we put a number on it. The report sets out what your family would actually face if no plan is in place — the cost of long-term care, a guardianship proceeding if no power of attorney exists, probate and court costs, and Massachusetts estate tax if your estate is exposed to it — and totals them.

Beside that column is a second one showing what each of those looks like with a plan in place. These are not hypotheticals. They are the specific things that happen to families who wait, priced against your own situation.

What happens if you are still here, but cannot manage your own affairs

Planning is not only about death. The report reviews whether you have the three documents that matter while you are alive:

• A durable power of attorney, so someone you trust can manage your finances if you cannot
• A health care proxy, so someone you choose makes your medical decisions
• A HIPAA authorization, so those people can actually get the information they need

Without them, the alternative is a court-appointed guardianship. That is expensive, public, and decided by someone who has never met your family.

What we would recommend — and what we would not

The report ends with a specific recommendation for your family, written in plain language, with the reasoning shown.

It also says what we are not recommending. If your estate is nowhere near the point where advanced tax planning earns its keep, the report says so and explains why we are leaving it alone. We would rather tell you that in writing than sell you something you do not need.

What to address first

Finally, a short ordered list of what to do first, second and third — because the sequence matters. Funding a trust before a look-back period starts, for example, is worth far more than doing the same work a year later.

Yours to keep, either way

The Family Protection Report is yours. If you decide to work with us, it becomes the blueprint. If you decide not to, you still leave knowing exactly how your assets are titled, what your family is exposed to, and what you would need to do about it — which is more than most people have after paying for a consultation elsewhere.

The report is prepared for people who book a Strategic Planning Session after attending one of our webinars. The webinar covers wills versus trusts, how probate actually works in Massachusetts, and the mistakes that cost families the most. Everything else we offer attendees, we present there.

See our upcoming webinar dates