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ESTATE PLANNING
Good estate planning focuses on taking care of you while you’re well and providing you with the right tools, so you can indirectly retain control, while disabled.
After you have passed on good estate planning allows you to give what you want to whom you want when you want and in the manner that you want.
Our clients agree that estate planning is about:
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Maintaining control of your property while alive
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Taking care of you and your loved ones if you’re disabled
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Giving what you have to whom you want, the way your want, and when you want
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Saving every last tax dollar, professional fee, and court cost legally possible
O’Brien & Associates strives to provide caring and compassionate client service. We want our client’s to know that we’re here to take care of them rather than sending them out the door with “documents”.
Gerard W. O’Brien counsels clients on ways to accomplish their goals including:
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Ensuring a surviving spouse has the ability to maintain his or her lifestyle with the least restrictions
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Implementing a disability protection plan that isn’t contingent upon a financial institution accepting your General Durable Power of Attorney
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Minimizing potential family conflicts regarding decisions about your healthcare and property distributions
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Ensuring your children are raised by your choice of guardian
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Protecting a surviving spouse from creditors, disgruntled son/daughter-in-laws divorcing out of the family, and bad judgment
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Protecting a child’s inheritance from divorce, creditors, and “sudden wealth syndrome”
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Ensuring business continuity or maximizing the value upon the sale of the business after the death or disability of the owner
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Avoiding unnecessary costs, delays, and loss of privacy associated with probate
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Leaving a charitable legacy
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Eliminating estate taxes
O’Brien & Associates also focuses on helping business owners plan for the “unique” transfer issues they’re presented with and achieve their ultimate goal of taking care of family members. We also handle conservatorship proceedings and Medicaid qualification planning services for elderly clients and their families.
TEAM BASED PLANNING
Our legal system is adversarial, but your estate planning need not be. Perhaps over the years you have developed a network of advisors, an accountant, insurance advisor, stockbroker, or business advisor. We want to work with them as a part of working for you. Gerard W. O’Brien and Associates appreciates the contribution that these professionals have made to your life and estate. While we will always seek to move you and your estate in the most advantageous direction, and will point out where corrections need to be made, we can and do recognize that your planning team may have you on the right path already, and we are happy to be with the team.
PROBATE - HOW WE WORK |
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PRACTICE AREAS
SENIORS AND THE LAW | You as a senior have many rights and with those rights, protections. You need to know what your rights are and you need to how and when to assert them. We can help you.
PROBATE | The very word probate causes folks to dispair they envision scenes from Dicken's Bleak House and court personel who are as welcoming a crows. This is not true in Orange County California where probate can provide the formal administration framework to get families through difficult times. Additionallywith the new technologies available to personal representatives and attorneys the process can be reasonably quick, value priced and not at all like Bleak House.
STATE PLANNING |
Your successor Trustee wants to complete the process as quickly as possible, while minimizing
family disharmony.
RETIREMENT PLANNING |
Maximize the benefits you have earned while preserving transferability, stretch, principal.
HEALTH CARE DOCUMENTS | You need a power of attorney for health care, a HIPAA declaration, and a living will. Without them your preferences during incapacity will not be followed.
ASSET PROTECTION PLANNING |
Keep your assets out of the hands of creditors, predators, and the public treasury, ethically and legally.
ESTATE & GIFT TAX PLANNING | Effective tax planning will not only lower income taxes while you’re alive by implementing optimal tax deferral and other strategies, but it will also free up cash for investment, business, or personal purposes.
POWERS OF ATTORNEY | Perhaps the most flexible tool in an estate plan most people including many attorneys do not understand what can be accomplished using this device.
BUSINESS PLANNING | From years of planning experience, we have developed a systematic process that is both practical and client-friendly.
CHARITABLE GIFT PLANNING | Most people work to better not only their family's situation but the community they live in and the world in which their community is a citizen. We will help you transfer values as well as assets. Perhaps the most flexible tool in an estate plan most people including many attorneys do not understand what can be accomplished using this device.
PRIVATE FOUNDATIONS | Some families and individuals are charitably minded and interested in directing their gifts to charities over an extended period of time. These people often find Foundations the right choice to accomplish this goal. |
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Jerry O’Brien - Estate Planning Attorney in Orange County including:
Brea, Anaheim, Anaheim hills, Fullerton, Yorba Linda, Newport Beach, Costa Mesa,
Santa Ana, Tustin, Irvine,
and other cities in Orange County CA.
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