Beyond the Will: Why a Comprehensive Estate Plan is Essential for High-Net-Worth Families

Summary: High-net-worth individuals and families need more than a will to protect their legacy. A truly comprehensive estate plan integrates tax strategy, legal structure, and wealth management to preserve and transfer assets efficiently. Learn how Aprio’s integrated team brings these elements together under one roof and provides a seamless estate planning approach that minimizes taxes and reduces complexity for generations to come.

When it comes to protecting your wealth and securing your legacy, an estate plan is one of the most important investments you can make. But a will by itself rarely captures the full picture.

Like many high-net-worth individuals, you probably have complex assets, business interests, and philanthropic goals that need to be organized and coordinated. To be successful, your estate plan should bring together tax strategy, legal structure, and wealth management under one cohesive umbrella.

In this article, we’ll start from square one and explain the importance of comprehensive estate planning, the building blocks of a solid strategy, and the most common surprises to watch out for.

Why a will isn’t enough

While a will is essential to any standard estate plan, it only addresses a narrow set of questions: who inherits your assets and how. If you have a substantial and diverse portfolio of assets, then you will need to address the legal, tax, and wealth management details that come with those questions. On top of that, you need to make sure that the strategies that power these components are working in concert.

The coordination piece of this puzzle is where many estate plans fall short. Without properly aligning your legal documents, financial plans, investment portfolios, and tax strategies, your advisors, heirs, and executors may misunderstand your intentions. As a result, your assets could be taxed inefficiently, and you’ll miss opportunities to preserve wealth for future generations.

What makes up a comprehensive estate plan?

While every person’s situation is distinctive, you can expect all sophisticated estate plans to include the following items:

• Foundational documents such as wills, revocable living trusts, and powers of attorney.
• Advanced planning tools like irrevocable trusts, family limited partnerships, or charitable trusts to minimize estate taxes and protect family assets.
• Business succession planning that aligns the future of your company with your personal estate and wealth transfer goals.
• Investment and wealth coordination, which helps ensure that your portfolio and estate plan complement one another.
• Digital and general asset planning, which includes everything from intellectual property and digital currencies to art collections or family heirlooms.
• Monte Carlo scenario planning, which enables you to weigh the risks and trade-offs of financial decisions.

The right estate planning team will take a holistic view of your plan and carefully orchestrate the components above. Your team should also evaluate your beneficiaries, your taxable and non-taxable estate, and your liquidity needs, and then make strategic recommendations to help you achieve your goals.

Preparing for estate planning complexity

For most high-net-worth individuals, estate planning is not a one-time event; rather it’s an ongoing process that evolves with changes in wealth, family structure, and federal and state tax laws.

Tax law changes, in particular, can dramatically impact estate planning. The current federal estate tax exemption (which is roughly $30 million for married couples) is expected to sunset in 2026, potentially decreasing by half and exposing many families who are not currently taxable to significant estate tax liability. The right, integrated estate planning team can review your plan regularly and identify major areas of exposure to help you prepare appropriately.

Routine estate plan reviews are also essential if you’re anticipating a major liquidity event, such as the sale of a business. For instance, if your current net worth is $10 million but you expect to make a major exit that could push it to $100 million, you could reap the benefits of early, proactive estate planning. While we can’t predict the future, we can plan for it.

Common estate planning “surprises”

For high-net-worth individuals, one of the biggest estate planning surprises is the concept of step-up in basis. Step-up in basis is the adjustment of an asset’s value for tax purposes upon inheritance. When someone passes away, the basis gets stepped up to fair market value, which can be a game-changer for heirs.

Another common surprise is the cost and corresponding value of sophisticated planning. It’s true that an advanced estate plan can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars across legal, tax, and other professional fees. But that investment regularly saves families tens of millions in taxes. Framed this way, the ROI of comprehensive planning is unmatched for high-net-worth individuals and families with significant estates.

Aside from cost and step-up in basis, many individuals and families are surprised by the emotional and even philosophical questions that come up during the estate planning process, including: What do you want your legacy to represent? How much wealth should the next generation inherit? How much do you want to donate to charity or other causes you care about? The right estate planning team can help you navigate those questions and obtain answers with empathy, discretion, and clarity.

The power of an integrated estate planning team

At its core, estate planning isn’t just a technical or financial process; it’s deeply personal. When performed by the right professional team, estate planning helps ensure that the people and causes that matter most to you are cared for, and that your wealth serves a meaningful purpose beyond your lifetime.

Of course, it wasn’t always that way. Historically, if you wanted to create an estate plan, you would need to designate multiple advisors to supervise necessary activities: a CPA for your taxes, a lawyer for your estate planning documents, and a financial planner for your investments. When it came to managing your plan, each professional played a role, but they didn’t work in tandem. For many high-net-worth individuals, this traditional approach resulted in gaps, inefficiencies, and even costly mistakes.

To manage your estate plan appropriately, you shouldn’t have to single-handedly coordinate with outside professionals, and you shouldn’t be subjected to increased costs and errors. Firms like Aprio house estate planning specialists under one roof, which means they can address issues early, make sure your documents and strategies are consistent, and help you make better, faster decisions.

Final thoughts

The best time to start or revisit your estate plan is before you need it. Whether your estate is valued in the millions or the tens of millions, Aprio can help develop a fully integrated plan that protects your legacy, minimizes risk, and enhances your family’s financial future. Our team of legal, tax, and financial professionals can help you design and implement a plan that reflects your goals, adapts to change, and stands the test of time.