Sure, doctors in Orange County and across the rest of the country have many of the same estate planning needs as do lay persons with no connection to the medical industry.
After all, many planning considerations are commonplace if not universal, regardless of a person’s occupation. Virtually any individual or couple sitting down with an estate planning attorney wants to ensure that loved ones are taken care of down the road, that taxes can be avoided where legally possible, that important assets are preserved and that so-called “legacy planning” is carefully attended to.
As noted in an online article discussing doctors and estate administration, though, physicians are often differentiated from many other planners in multiple ways, which can make a timely and well-considered focus on implementation of an estate plan an absolute imperative.
For starters (and this is no great secret), many doctors who are well-tenured specialists in their fields and who command many years of experience are comparatively wealthy individuals.
And that wealth is often dispersed among many asset categories, including savings accounts, various retirement vehicles, one or more trusts, real estate holdings, substantial personal property, and stocks and bonds.
And, of course, a truly important and singular asset for many doctors is their medical practice. How much is that worth? How can it be properly valued? What is a doctor considering as he or she contemplates the future of that practice years down the road?
As the above-cited article states, many doctors “by their busy nature are procrastinators when it comes to their own financial health.” And that is eminently understandable, given their exhausting schedules and the energies they routinely expend on patient needs.
Making the requisite effort to get things in order, though, pays off in countless ways.
“The single most important takeaway,” notes the aforementioned media overview, “is that [physicians] will save time, money and unnecessary aggravation by creating an estate plan.”
A proven estate administration attorney with a deep well of experience working with doctors and other medical professionals can help ensure that planning needs are comprehensively identified and that objectives are carefully addressed through tailored legal documentation.
