Every adult should have an estate plan. Most don’t. And of those who do, many have plans built years or decades ago that no longer reflect their current family, current assets, or current law.
Working with your attorney or with the affiliated attorneys at Kim & Associates, LLC, if you don’t have one, we coordinate the drafting, review, and updating of the documents that direct your wealth and your care: wills, revocable living trusts, durable powers of attorney, healthcare directives and living wills, and beneficiary designations on retirement accounts and life insurance policies.
But documents alone are not a plan. The most common reason estate plans fail is not bad drafting; it is incomplete execution. A trust is signed but never funded. A beneficiary designation on a 401(k) still names a former spouse. A piece of real estate is titled in an individual name when the plan calls for it to be in the trust. A life insurance policy is owned by the wrong person for the structure to work.
At Symphony, the work does not end when the documents are signed. We coordinate the follow-through that makes the plan actually work: retitling assets into the appropriate trusts, updating beneficiary designations across retirement accounts and insurance policies, registering ownership changes with custodians and counterparties, and confirming that every piece of your financial life points where your estate plan says it should. And we review these registrations regularly because every life event, every account opening, every business transaction can quietly knock part of your plan out of alignment.
For families with larger or more complex estates, foundational documents are only the starting point. Tax-efficient wealth transfer often requires advanced trust structures and gifting strategies designed to move significant assets to the next generation while minimizing estate
and gift taxes.
For families with the assets and complexity to warrant them, advanced wealth transfer strategies can provide meaningful tax efficiency. Strategies we coordinate include irrevocable life insurance trusts (ILITs) for estate liquidity, grantor retained annuity trusts (GRATs) for transferring appreciation, family limited partnerships (FLPs) for transferring closely held business interests at discounted valuations, spousal lifetime access trusts (SLATs) for balancing tax efficiency with family access, dynasty trusts for multi-generational planning, and qualified personal residence trusts (QPRTs) for the family home. These strategies require coordination with qualified legal and tax counsel and may not be appropriate for every family. Every strategy is built and reviewed alongside your investment plan and your business plan, so the pieces actually work together.
For many of our clients, transferring wealth is not only about heirs. It is about the causes, communities, and institutions they want to support and the values they want the next generation to inherit alongside
the assets.
We help families design charitable giving strategies that align with both their financial plan and their values: donor-advised funds, charitable remainder trusts (CRTs), charitable lead trusts (CLTs), qualified charitable distributions from IRAs, and direct gifting of appreciated assets. And we help families plan for the human side of wealth transfer, preparing the next generation to receive, manage, and steward what they will inherit. The goal is not just to move assets. The goal is to preserve the family, the values, and the legacy that come with them.