By Kristina Schneider, Practice Success Coach As we head into the final quarter of 2024, you may be wondering where all the time went and what can you do in these final two months to really help your practice end the year with a BANG! I’ve put together what I consider to be the Top 10 Year-End Practice-Building and Marketing Ideas for 2024 so that you can end this year on a productive, positive note and head into 2025 with some momentum! IDEA #1: Clean up your database. Now is a great time to take a look at your database…
FOMO: How the Fear of Missing Out Will Cause Bad Estate Planning Decisions Before the 12/31/2025 Sunset
By Steven J. Oshins, Esq., AEP (Distinguished) When the clock strikes midnight the evening of December 31, 2025, the federal estate and gift exemption will drop in half and many wealthy people will kick themselves for failing to make their gifts and use their gift tax exemption in time. That is, assuming the incoming President and Congress don’t extend the current laws before they expire. What is FOMO? “FOMO” is the fear of missing out. Many wealthy people fear missing out on their large gifting prior to the end of end of 2025. If the federal estate and gift tax…
2024 National Estate Planning Awareness Week
The third week of October is National Estate Planning Awareness Week. This year, it’s October 21-27. Bringing awareness and educating the public about estate planning is crucial to not only keeping families out of Probate Court, but also for helping manage, preserve and distribute their hard-earned assets to their loved ones, as they wish. To help spread the word about estate planning and National Estate Planning Awareness Week, feel free to download and use the image below in your public marketing (website, blogs, newsletters, social media, etc.).
The Top 6 Reasons You Should Be Giving Seminars
By Philip J. Kavesh, J.D., LL.M. (Taxation), CFP®, ChFC, California State Bar Certified Specialist in Estate Planning, Trust & Probate Law For estate planning attorneys, all of the technical and legal education in the world is great, but if you are not able to bring in prospective clients to plan for, there is no way for you to be able to successfully run your own estate planning practice. If you regularly receive referrals from other sources, such as financial advisors, CPAs, life insurance agents or other attorneys, that’s great. However, what happens if those referrals stop? How consistent and predictable…
How Estate Planners Can Make The Most of Their Contact List
By Foster Web Marketing Finding perfect new clients for your estate planning firm is difficult. You have to do all the work to figure out where they are, make meaningful connections, build trust, and convince them that you are the right fit for their needs. My team and I help estate planning attorneys do this every day, and I’ll be the first to admit it. It’s necessary, and it gets results—but this stuff is tough! However, you probably already have something that could be an incredible shortcut toward getting great clients. You probably already have something that takes so many…
Top 6 Mistakes Estate Planning Attorneys Make with Prospective New Clients
By Kristina Schneider, Practice Success Coach As an attorney, your time is important and there are a lot of people out there who want free legal advice. It is a common practice for many estate planning attorneys to offer a free consultation to prospective clients, so those who are insisting on charging a fee for initial consultations are creating a barrier to entry and eliminating potential new clients who otherwise seek attorneys not charging for their initial meeting. Over the years, I have heard a number of common mistakes made by estate planning attorneys with respect to how they handle…
SLATs and the Reciprocal Trust Doctrine: Just Because Nearly Everyone Is Violating It Doesn’t Make It Okay
By Steven J. Oshins, Esq., AEP (Distinguished) What is a Spousal Lifetime Access Trust? A Spousal Lifetime Access Trust (“SLAT”) is an irrevocable trust set up by one spouse for the benefit of the other spouse and other beneficiaries. The most frequently used version is the completed gift SLAT although incomplete gift SLATs can be used as a creditor protection tool and should be used more often than it is. The completed gift SLAT is primarily used for estate tax reduction purposes, and secondarily as a creditor protection tool. Because of the estate tax reduction benefits, especially since the settlor…
Training Associate Attorneys & Staff
By Philip J. Kavesh, J.D., LL.M. (Taxation), CFP®, ChFC, California State Bar Certified Specialist in Estate Planning, Trust & Probate Law Over the past couple of months, we covered the importance of properly hiring and incentivizing your associate attorneys and support staff in order to build and maintain a successful estate planning practice. Now, we will address training. As I’ve stressed in all other aspects of your practice, you must have processes, procedures, forms and systems for everything that happens in your law firm on a daily basis. This includes your marketing, client meetings, work production and work review, as…
Multiple Financial Advisor Referral Relationships May Be a Big MISTAKE!
By Philip J. Kavesh, J.D., LL.M. (Taxation), CFP®, ChFC, California State Bar Certified Specialist in Estate Planning, Trust & Probate Law Does that sound crazy to you? Probably! But, hear me out. (By the way, if you’re a financial advisor, what I’ll say applies equally to you having too many estate planning attorney relationships.) Over the years, I have consistently heard fellow estate planning attorneys tell me all of the reasons why the dedicated, single-financial advisor referral relationship (or a relationship with only one company or group of advisors) that I use in my practice doesn’t work or why it…
3 Reasons to Audit Your Estate Planning Website Content
By Foster Web Marketing As your website expands, older content can go stale. It might be inaccurate or outdated, or it might just be a little out of line with your current brand and messaging. You can’t just delete all that old content because you risk losing leads and getting in trouble with search engines. Unfortunately, the same goes if you just hang on to your old content without making any changes. That’s why we recommend digging a little deeper into your content with a comprehensive website content audit. A content audit is a systematic review and analysis of all…