Most estate plans get created once and revisited rarely, but an estate plan is exactly where your family’s money and values meet. Done well, your estate plan documents decisions your family can understand and stand behind.
Trust and estate planning at this level is not a one-time transaction. For ultra-high-net-worth families, it is ongoing work that should keep pace with your life, your holdings, and the law. Not only should your documents be correct and the tax work clean; your estate plan also needs to communicate what you want your wealth to accomplish.
Trust and estate planning for ultra-high-net-worth families calls for someone holding the whole picture. Savant serves that role. We help you clarify your intent, model potential tax and transfer consequences, review whether the plan is funded and titled as intended, and prepare the people who will inherit.
Your Savant team draws on specialists from across our firm, including tax professionals, the trust professionals of Savant Private Trust, and the attorneys of Savant Legal, LLP, and we coordinate closely with the advisors your family already relies on.
The result is a plan that helps your family feel prepared for the future, with a team that keeps it current.
Families often assemble estate planning services from parts. An attorney drafts. A bank administers. An advisor invests. A CPA reports. Each does capable work, and no one holds the whole picture.
Savant closes those gaps with a three-pronged perspective:
Before any documents, we ask what you want your money to accomplish. Family dynamics and personal values drive the hardest estate planning decisions, so that’s where we’ll start. Because if documents drive the process, your plan may end up technically correct, but personally wrong.
We plan deliberately for estate, gift, and income tax efficiency, and resist complexity that exists for its own sake. A plan your family cannot understand or administer will not survive you.
You want the right assets to pass to the right people, at the right time and in the right way. Our goal is for beneficiary designations, titling, funding, and trustee selection to not only match your documents, but also your life as it evolves. We review, fund, and prepare your inheritors so your plan still reflects your intent on the day we implement your plan.
Advanced estate planning solutions, coordinated by one team.
We translate your intentions into structure, covering wills, revocable trusts, powers of attorney, and health care directives, then help review and update the documents as your family changes.
Irrevocable, dynasty, grantor, charitable, and special needs trusts each solve different problems. We help ultra-affluent families choose the right trust strategies to do the job.
Savant Private Trust handles trustee duties, distributions, recordkeeping, and reporting, so trusts operate as written and beneficiaries know what to expect.
Deciding how to transfer wealth to heirs takes modeling, not guesswork. We compare lifetime gifting, sales to trusts, and exemption use, along with the tax effect of each.
Closely held businesses complicate every plan. Our estate planning strategies for business owners align ownership structure, buy-sell agreements, and transfer timing with family goals.
Donor-advised funds, charitable trusts, and private foundations amplify your generosity with structure. We help you choose a vehicle and integrate it with the rest of your plan.
Most families come to us with a plan already in place, and we believe that’s the best place to start. Share what you have, and we will work with you to determine what still works, what has aged, and what we could do differently to protect your legacy wealth transfer.
Estate and trust planning is the process of deciding how your assets will be managed and distributed, then building the legal structures to carry out those decisions. It covers wills, trusts, powers of attorney, beneficiary designations, and business ownership arrangements, along with the estate tax planning and funding steps that make those documents effective.
A will directs how assets pass at death and goes through probate, which is a public court process. A trust can hold and manage assets during your lifetime and after, generally outside probate, and can control the timing and conditions of distributions. Many families use both, and the right combination depends on your goals, your state, and your assets.
Review your plan every few years and after any significant change, including a marriage, divorce, birth, death, business sale, move to another state, or major shift in tax law. Documents that are technically valid can still be badly out of date, especially when assets have been added since the plan was drafted.
Families transfer wealth through lifetime gifts, trusts, sales to family entities, beneficiary designations, and bequests at death. Each route carries different tax, control, and timing consequences, so the useful question is not which technique is best, but which combination fits your intentions. Modeling the options side by side before committing is a practical starting point.
An estate planning attorney designs and drafts the legal documents that carry out your wishes, advises on tax and ownership structure, and helps implement the plan by retitling assets and funding trusts. At Savant, the estate planning attorneys of Savant Legal, LLP handle this work alongside your advisor and tax team.
Not always, though families with significant or complex wealth often benefit from one. Depending on applicable law and individual circumstances, trusts may provide privacy, help avoid probate, support asset protection planning, and control how and when heirs receive distributions. A review of your current documents is the fastest way to know whether a trust adds value in your situation.
Yes. Dynasty trusts, generation-skipping structures, and grantor retained annuity trusts each solve a different problem, and the right one depends on what you want the wealth to do and over how long. We model how each affects your family’s tax position today and your heirs’ position decades from now, with the attorneys of Savant Legal, LLP and your tax professionals working from the same set of facts. Trust and tax decisions are often closely related, so we coordinate them as part of one planning conversation.