Brown Brothers Harriman
By Stacia Kroetz & Alison Kelly Hutchinson
March 4th, 2025
The future is unknowable, but centering your plan on your values and communicating regularly with your fiduciary and your family will set your family on the path to success.
Sitting down with an estate planning attorney means investing a significant amount of time and energy learning technical legal and tax strategies, options, and implications. The initial meetings will outline the value of trusts, how much you can give, and the vehicles that can protect assets from creditors and preserve them for heirs. These are important issues worthy of thoughtful consideration. At times, however, “estate planning fatigue” sets in, and a larger point is left unstated and unaddressed: The estate plan will mature at an unknown moment in the future.
Because it is impossible to know the point at which an estate plan will go into effect, it is also impossible to know the legal and tax landscape in which the plan will need to operate. Further, we cannot predict the health, well-being, or financial position of family members or unborn descendants who may benefit from the vehicles set up in the estate plan. For these reasons, tax and trusts are mere pieces of a well-rounded plan. It is just as, if not more, important that the legal documents create a plan that is flexible enough to reflect your values and accomplish your goals both now and into the future. In other words, the plan must be resilient.
BBH Senior Wealth Planners Ali Hutchinson and Stacia Kroetz outline the importance of having a flexible estate plan.
Build flexibility into your plan– The future is unknown. Premature death, disability, natural disasters, significant financial success, addiction, divorce, and tax law changes are all possible future events, yet traditional tax planning assumes all families share the same future, goals, and values. For these reasons, when wealth preservation is a goal, it is crucial to construct an estate plan that enables you and your family to adjust as circumstances change.
Stacia Kroetz & Alison Kelly Hutchinson, BBH Senior Wealth Planners
Without flexibility, even the most technically sound estate plan may become obsolete in the face of reality.
