Planning Your Will, Trust, LPA & More

Keon Chee

Description

With society's rising affluence, children and families stand to inherit properties and many thousands and millions of dollars when parents and relatives pass away. The importance of setting out clear instructions about the distribution of your assets or wealth while you are still alive cannot be overstated. This process of estate planning involves making a will and perhaps setting up a trust, depending on your personal circumstances. The rise of the modern family and what such a family is likely to own, add to the diversity of planning required. In addition to the traditional two-parent family, we have families with single parents, partners of different races, nationalities and faiths, and same-sex partners. The modern family is likely to own foreign assets, a business, pets and digital assets, and likely to consider charitable giving in their estate planning. In this book, estate planner Keon Chee takes you through the various aspects of estate planning, including the writing of a will, the setting up of a trust, planning your Lasting Power of Attorney (LPA) and setting out other important final wishes. The author has invited several highly experienced practitioners to share their specialist knowledge throughout the book enhancing the breadth of coverage.

Sujets

• Gestion et management
• Personal finance

Informations

• Publié par: Marshall Cavendish International
• Date de parution: 18 septembre 2020
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9789814928137
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

2020 Marshall Cavendish International (Asia) Private Limited
Text Keon Chee
Published by Marshall Cavendish Editions
An imprint of Marshall Cavendish International

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National Library Board, Singapore Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
Names: Chee, Keon.
Title: Planning your will, trust, LPA more : estate planning for the modern family / Keon Chee.
Description: Singapore : Marshall Cavendish Editions, 2020
Identifiers: OCN 1190521517 | eISBN 978 981 4928 13 7
Subjects: LCSH: Estate planning--Singapore. | Finance, Personal--Singapore.
Classification: DDC 332.024016--dc23
Printed in Singapore
Source of maps on pages 240 (Malaysia), 246 (Indonesia), 254 (Thailand), 262 (The Philippines), 275 (Vietnam), 282 (China), 290 (Australia), 299 (UK) and 306 (US): The World Factbook 2020 . Washington, DC: Central Intelligence Agency, 2020.
To my mother - my dearest friend and hero
CONTENTS
Preface
Introduction
PART 1 - THE SIX ESSENTIAL ESTATE PLANNING DOCUMENTS
1 Will
2 Will Trust
3 Lasting Power of Attorney
4 Advanced Medical Directive
5 Advance Care Planning
6 Grant of Probate
PART 2 - SPECIAL SITUATIONS: FAMILY
7 Planning and Funding a Will Trust
8 Aspects of Living Trusts
9 Uses of Living Trusts
10 Retirement Planning Amidst Turbulent Times
11 Traditional Life Insurance
12 Variable Universal Life Insurance
13 Trust Investments
14 Pillars of Wealth
15 Marriage and Divorce
16 Guardianship
17 Christians
18 Muslims
19 Persons with Special Needs
20 Giving
PART 3 - SPECIAL SITUATIONS: BUSINESS
21 Starting a Business
22 Protecting the Business (with Keyman Protection)
23 Protecting the Shareholders (with Buy-Sell Agreement)
24 Protecting the Family Business (with Family Governance)
25 Family Offices
PART 4 - SPECIAL SITUATIONS: FOREIGN ELEMENT
26 Malaysia
27 Indonesia
28 Thailand
29 The Philippines
30 Vietnam
31 China
32 Australia
33 United Kingdom
34 The United States
35 Foreigner in Singapore
36 Common Reporting Standard
CONCLUSION
37 Finding the Right Estate Planner: 10 Questions to Ask
Contributors
About the Author
Preface
With one instruction in a Will, a person can impact his family for decades. Such is the power of estate planning - it can either set children up to lead happy and successful lives or, with poor planning, cause close-knit families to fight and fritter away their wealth.
These days, people often give to others beyond their immediate family. A person who makes a gift to charity leaves a legacy of kindness to the community as well as to his family. Estate planning at its core spreads benevolence all around. A family s estate planner holds a position of privilege and shoulders hefty responsibility.
Estate planning can, however, be a very complex subject, full of technical language and unending flexibility. I find myself constantly simplifying and using analogies to convey my points to the persons I am planning for and to the students who attend my classes.
For example, I would explain to a mother of two young children that a Trust is like a protected piggy bank: someone called the trustee will look after her monies when she passes away, and will make payments to her children over a period of time. Of course, I would have the technical definitions at the back of my mind to substantiate my insights and to clarify the finer details.
Albert Einstein said, If you can t explain it to a six-year-old, you don t understand it yourself. I live very closely by this quote.
WHY I WROTE THIS BOOK
To write about estate planning in simple language is one of the main reasons I embarked on this book project. I want to provide a simple explanation of how things work in this area while being authoritative in the accuracy of what is being written. I believe that if I am able to make things simple to understand, readers would be more likely to take action on their estate plans, and that would be the most desired outcome.
To help me in the latter objective of being authoritative, I brought together nearly 30 practitioners from a dozen countries to contribute by adding depth and breadth to the information relating to their respective countries and specialist area. Each of them was told to provide the reader with planning insights and if advice or more information is needed, the reader could contact them directly. I am immensely grateful for their tremendous contributions, expertise and friendship. Their brief profiles are found at the back of the book.
Second, people don t naturally wake up in the morning and proclaim, What a great day it is to plan for my future death! In order to encourage families to take action sooner rather than later, I invited several of my accomplished financial adviser friends to share their experiences on how to close the deal . Closing the deal means the transfer of benefits. Not closing the deal means yet another day or week would pass without an estate plan in place for the individual in question.
Third, I want very much to dispel the common belief that Trusts are expensive and complicated, and only for the wealthy. The fact is that anyone who has young children or elderly parents would need a Trust to stagger the distribution of monies over time. A Will that makes immediate payments only could be a defective plan for many families. For example, a lump sum gift of several million dollars to a young beneficiary could rob the initiative out of him to lead a productive life. Trusts can, of course, be more costly and complex given a family s unique situation, but there are basic Trusts that can be set up affordably and quite simply to meet the needs of many families.
MODERN ESTATE PLANNING
Do any of the following qualities describe you?
You have a long life - you may run out of retirement funds and could lose mental capacity one day due to old age.
You are wealthy - or if you are not, you have the ability to create wealth with insurance and investments.
You love to travel and you may not be born in Singapore - you own foreign properties and bank accounts. Or your spouse could be a foreigner - one in every three marriages in Singapore is between a Singapore citizen and a foreigner.
You may be divorced - you are also concerned about the possible divorce of your children.
You may have married into a blended family, where there are children from other marriages and relationships.
You are likely to start or own a business, or be self-employed.
You want to leave something to charity.
Modern estate planning requires a broad knowledge of many areas for the modern Singaporean. I started to acquire this broad knowledge five years ago.
Where I didn t know enough of an area, such as divorce or estate administration, I would take a course or volunteer to coteach with an experienced practitioner. Where expertise was not readily available in Singapore, I would take an overseas trip to meet foreign lawyers and practitioners in order to learn about how estate planning is done in their countries.
I am not an expert in estate planning or in any particular area of estate planning. I started as a Trust practitioner nine years ago, and today I work as a Trust and Estate Planning Consultant at Kensington Trust Singapore Limited. I can easily count at least a hundred people in Singapore who have more experience and knowledge in Trusts and estate planning than I do. My strength, however, lies in being able to simplify and teach estate planning in a way that can be easily understood.
We live in a world where the road has many forks and can take us on many amazing journeys. It is often difficult to know the final destination of these journeys. In estate planning, I believe I have found what is not only the final destination, but the final journey. This book is a major milestone in that journey.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I wish to acknowledge several people who have helped me along the way.
To Lee Chiwi, CEO of Precepts Trustee (previously known as Rockwills Trustee), who hired me in September 2011 and threw me into the fire by getting me to teach Trustee Duties in a STEP Certificate class the following April. I am immensely grateful for the opportunities to learn under his charge.
To Guy Burnett, my UK and New Zealand lawyer friend who encouraged me to study law and who frequently explained key legal concepts to me (which often took time to sink in). It took me six years but I finally graduated at the age of 53.
To Ernest Wong, who has encouraged and advised me from the very start of my entrepreneurial journey. Ernest is a rare gentleman