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).