Aligning estate plans with investment plans.

Titling and beneficiary designations

Investment account titling and beneficiary designations OVERRIDE the will and trust documents. A perfectly drafted estate plan that calls for assets to flow through a marital trust can be entirely defeated by an old beneficiary designation naming an adult child directly on the largest IRA.

This audit is foundational and almost always reveals at least one out-of-date designation. It needs to happen at the start of any new estate-plan engagement and be re-audited annually.

Trust funding

A revocable trust is only as useful as the assets actually titled into it. Many trusts are drafted, signed, and then never funded — meaning the assets that were supposed to live inside them never get re-titled. When the grantor dies, those assets end up in probate anyway. Investment and estate sides need to actively close this gap.

Lifetime gifting strategies

Annual exclusion gifts ($18,000/person/year as of 2024), larger lifetime exemption uses, intra-family loans, GRATs, irrevocable life insurance trusts — all of these interact with both the investment plan and the estate plan. Decisions about WHICH assets to gift (appreciated securities? cash? business interests?) require both sides to be looking at the same picture.

Charitable structures

Donor-advised funds, private foundations, charitable remainder trusts, charitable lead trusts — different vehicles fit different situations. The investment side has views on the underlying asset selection within the structure; the estate side has views on the tax efficiency and the multi-generational governance implications. Both have to be in the conversation.

Estate-tax exemption planning

The federal estate-tax exemption is currently at historic highs ($13.61M per person in 2024) but is scheduled to sunset in 2026 to approximately half that level (adjusted for inflation). For HNW families above the future exemption threshold, the coming sunset creates real planning windows — but only if investment and estate sides coordinate on which assets to use the current exemption against.

Multi-generational considerations

The investment time horizon for an HNW family is often much longer than any single client's life — assets are being managed for the next generation and beyond. The investment plan needs to reflect that horizon; the estate plan needs to reflect how the investment plan will function across the transitions. Coordinated planning treats these as the same problem.

See Premier's Estate & Wealth Transfer service for our process around this.