Estate planning increasingly deals with challenging situations.
These include blended families, where spouses have children from
prior marriages and want to pass on their estate to their own
children, rather than their spouse's children. We are also
seeing couples with no children who wish to ensure their respective
family members or favourite charities are provided for when both
have died.
Trusts are the tried and true method of ensuring capital
succession to a client's desired beneficiaries. For example, a
surviving spouse can draw income and the trustees can have power to
use capital for the surviving spouse's benefit, with the
remaining capital passing to the client's chosen beneficiaries
when the spouse dies.
