DuPage County Legacy Planning Attorney

Estate Planning Lawyers for Passing on Your Legacy in Illinois

As you make plans for the future, you will need to address a number of concerns related to your finances, your personal needs, and your desires to provide for your family. While estate planning will allow you to make decisions about how your assets will be passed to your heirs while also addressing your own financial needs during your lifetime, you may also want to consider the legacy you will leave behind. By incorporating your values, your family traditions, or other issues that are important to you and your family into your estate plan, you can rest assured that the positive results of your life’s work will continue into future generations.

The attorneys of the Gierach Law Firm can not only help you address the legal and financial issues involved in the estate planning process, but we can assist with legacy planning to ensure that you can continue to make a positive impact on your family and the world at large for years to come. With more than 30 years of experience, we know the best ways to use the tools and methods available to create a lasting legacy.

Protecting Your Family Legacy

There are a variety of estate planning tools that can help you use your assets to provide for your family’s needs. Our lawyers will explain the best methods of asset protection, and we can also assist with tax planning to ensure that you and your family will remain in control of your assets. In many cases, trusts can be used to provide for your needs throughout the rest of your life, and you can decide when to pass your assets to your beneficiaries while providing instructions for how they should be used.

Some other issues that you may want to consider during the legacy planning process include:

• Charitable giving – If you wish to support a cause that you believe in or give some of your assets to charity, you can make these donations a part of your estate plan. Our attorneys can help you take steps to make charitable donations throughout your life or set up a charitable trust to ensure that your assets will be used to support a charitable organization.
• Business succession plans – If you have spent time, money, and effort to build a business, you may want to take steps to ensure that it will stay in your family or continue to be operated according to your plans and desires. We can work with you to determine the best strategies for transferring ownership of business interests to family members, partners, or others while maintaining positive relationships between officers and employees and adhering to the business ethics you have practiced throughout your career.
• Family heirlooms – Whether the items you own have monetary or emotional value, you can make sure they will go to family members or loved ones who can appreciate them and use them to honor your memory. We can help you ensure that your will addresses ownership of important items while also leaving messages of love and support to your loved ones.
• Your Values and Wisdom – Many clients want to make sure that they pass on to their next generations what their values are and what they learned in their lifetime. They can accomplish this through the use of an ethical will to write out their values. Alternatively, they can create a video of their values and wisdom. We provide both of those items for clients. We also interview our clients as part of our life lessons program, in which we record the wisdom learned by our clients over their lifetime, so that the next generation will always know what wisdom that their parents or grandparents learned during their lifetime, sometimes the hard way.

Contact Our DuPage County Legacy Planning Lawyers

Your legacy is much more than just the money you have earned during your lifetime and the possessions that you own. By considering the true legacy that you want to leave for your loved ones, you can not only address their financial needs, but you can pass on wisdom and life lessons and make sure they are ready to carry on your family traditions and values. To learn how our attorneys can help you address legacy planning and other legal and financial issues when creating an estate plan, contact us at 630-228-9413 in Naperville or at 847-443-3684 in Hoffman Estates.