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Estate planning and deceased estates

Bertollo Advisory is a boutique legal practice focusing on estate planning and deceased estates.

Most of our work is referrals from accountants, lawyers and financial planners (including ‘top tier’ referrers), as well as word-of-mouth.

Our focus is building a long-term relationship with our clients and their advisers. This allows us to develop a deep understanding of our clients, thereby ensuring a more organic and robust estate plan and providing peace-of-mind for our clients.

Our client base covers a broad spectrum. We mainly act for business owners or people with complex arrangements (eg trusts; SMSFs), estate planning issues (eg blended families; vulnerable children) or potential multi-generational issues (eg children working in a business). We prefer to work closely with a client’s other professional advisers (eg accountants; financial planners; etc).

Both our strong client base and strong adviser referral base are testimony to the strength and reputation of our practice.

A sample of the work that we cover includes:

  • Testamentary trust wills.
  • Superannuation / SMSF considerations, including death benefit nominations.
  • Assets falling within or outside a will.
  • Foreign assets considerations.
  • Discussing the balance between a protective estate plan and a flexible estate plan (noting that an estate plan can be both protective and flexible).
  • Keeping estate plans as simple and practical as possible, without compromising the integrity of the goal of the estate plan (eg asset protection etc).
  • Discussing fairness in dealing with family members (whilst noting that sometimes fairness may not mean equality).
  • Blended family considerations (eg prior de facto partners / spouses; children from other relationships; pre-empting possible challenges to an estate; etc).
  • Lifetime trusts considerations.
  • Wealth / asset protection.
  • Consideration of asset-holding or operating structures (eg superannuation; trusts; companies; partnerships; etc).
  • Taxation / stamp duty considerations.
  • General and enduring powers of attorney.
  • Enduring powers of medical guardianship.
  • Succession planning (assessing the ability to pass on a business to family members or other co-owners and related strategies).
  • Deceased estates (ie probate etc).