Family and Estate Planning in Tupelo, MS

When you schedule your personal Family Wealth Planning Session, we block 2 hours on our calendar so we can focus entirely on you and your family during this time.

We will send you a package of information to complete before our time together, which will help you begin the process of getting your legal and financial life in order.

During our meeting together, we will guide you to gently look at what would happen for your loved ones and with your assets if something were to happen to you.

Then we'll look at what you want to happen and help you create a road map to get that plan in place as easily as possible. Clients routinely say “Wow, if we had known how easy this would be, we would have done it years ago!”

Our Family Wealth Planning Session is $750 and if we create a comprehensive plan for you, that planning fee is applied to your legal fees for your lifetime estate plan. In some circumstances, we will waive the planning session fee and instead you can secure your appointment time with a credit card number.

In such cases, so long as you keep your appointment, nothing will be charged on your card unless you decide to proceed with a comprehensive estate plan after the Family Wealth Planning Session. If you must cancel within 1 week of your appointment, your credit card will still not be charged unless you fail to reschedule your appointment within 30 days of your cancellation. If you cannot keep your appointment and you choose not to reschedule, your credit card would be charged the $750 planning fee.

We understand that this policy of securing your appointment with a credit card may seem unique. So is our law firm. We provide our very best service to those families who are looking for a long-term relationship with their trusted advisor.

We expend most of our energy providing an exceedingly high degree of service to our existing clients and limit the number of new clients we see each week. We only take referrals from trusted Professional Planning Partners. As a result, we must secure your appointment time so that if something comes up and you can't attend your appointment, we will have enough advance notice to open the slot to a waiting family.

About 3 days after scheduling your appointment, you will receive a mailer with your Family Wealth Inventory & Assessment and other important information that you will want to review prior to your personal Family Wealth Planning Session.

We must have your Family Wealth Inventory and Assessment returned to our office 3 days prior to your session either by mail, fax or email, or we will need to reschedule your session. Feel free to call the office at any time if you need assistance completing your worksheet or have any questions.

If you have existing estate planning documents, please make sure we have your existing documents in our office at least 1 week before your meeting so we can review them prior to meeting with you.

On the day of your meeting, please expect to spend up to 2 hours with your attorney. The initial meeting with your attorney has two purposes:

• To identify whether there is a good fit between you and our attorney who will become your Family Business Lawyer™
• To educate you about the law and what would happen if you died with your current (or no) plan in place.

By looking at what would happen under your current plan, you can identify what you would want to happen differently and then together with your Personal Family Lawyer's guidance, you will make the decisions that are necessary to give you the peace of mind.

Once you and your Family Business Lawyer™ have completed the design of your plan, you will:

We have a process of reviewing your documents with you that makes your plan easy to understand. Once you sign your planning documents, your assets and your family are protected as discussed during your design meeting.

At our final meeting during the planning stage of our relationship, we verify all of your asset transfers are moving forward on track whether we are taking the lead or you are taking the lead with our guidance. We review your asset spreadsheet with you and ensure all of your questions are answered. Of course, if they aren't or they become cloudy later on, we are always available to answer your questions at any time in the future at no charge.

After the planning phase is complete, the maintenance phase of your plan will begin.

At no additional charge, we review your plan at least every three years and keep you informed about changes in the law and about other issues that affect your family and your wealth.

If you participate in one of our Family Wealth VIP Membership programs, you will have an opportunity to review your plan on an annual basis, and we will provide your family with a number of other valuable services.

Call us today to learn about the Membership Programs. We are always here for you and we don't charge you for phone calls, faxes, or emails. We welcome your communications!

Planning for your estate starts out similarly to planning for your family—with a conversation about whether our firm is the best fit for your needs.

During the initial meeting, we will walk you through exactly what your loved ones would have to do and where your assets would go if something happened to you.

You will then be able to determine if there is anything about your current plan—or the state's plan for you—that you wouldn't like to happen.

We will help you to choose one of our three planning levels and fee that is right for your family and you and Melissa will then design a plan that will give you the peace of mind. Our fees begin at $2,000 and are all-inclusive, so there are no surprises.

Depending on the level of planning you choose and the complexity of your situation, a second design meeting is needed or a Whole Family Wealth Audit meeting is offered to review your financial matters.

Once your plan has been designed to your satisfaction, you will return to our office about 4-6 weeks later to sign your planning documents. At this point, your family and your assets will be totally protected in the case of your death or incapacity.

In most law firms, the relationship ends there. But we see the signing of these documents as the beginning of our relationship with your family. This is where our law firm is very different.

After you sign your legal documents, we create an electronic record of all of your legal documents so you can easily access them anytime you need to in the future, and then we schedule a legacy meeting with you. This is one of the most important meetings of our process because it's where we:

• Ensure your assets are all owned in the right way. You can have the best set of legal documents, but if your assets are not owned in the right way, it's all been a waste.
• Make sure everyone you've named to take care of your kids, the money you are leaving behind or you knows just what to do, if and when something happens.
• Capture and plan for your intangible assets – the values, insights, stories, and experiences – you would never want lost.

We meet with you at least every three years to review your plan and make sure it stays up to date. If that's not included in the planning you are doing, the set of documents you get are very unlikely to work when your family needs them.

1. Print the Family Wealth Inventory & Assessment worksheet.
2. Fill in as much as you can.
3. Make an appointment with us to discuss your plan.
4. Return the Family Wealth Inventory & Assessment worksheet to us at least 3 days in advance of our appointment.