Advanced planning entails leveraging the legal, tax, and regulatory systems to provide one or more of the following three often interconnected services:
- Wealth enhancement is the process of using advanced planning strategies to mitigate taxes resulting in greater personal wealth creation. There are a wide variety of strategies that can be utilized to enhance wealth. The adept use of charitable trusts, for example, can be instrumental in enhancing wealth while also enabling the affluent to appreciably benefit others. For individuals with significant liquid assets, some of the most attractive strategies incorporate private placement life insurance or private placement variable annuities.
- Estate planning is the process of legally structuring the future disposition of current and projected assets. Basic estate planning employing such strategies and financial products as credit-shelter trusts and traditional life insurance is fairly straightforward and sufficient for many of the affluent. For people with more complicated scenarios, there are a plethora of more sophisticated strategies including self-canceling installment notes, granter retained annuity trusts, and remainder purchase marital trusts.