Estate Planning
Your financial plan should be as holistic as possible and founded upon your unique circumstances, including your personal goals around your estate. Planning for legacy goals focuses on what you want to leave behind—whether that’s wealth, values, business interests, or philanthropic impact.
The essential steps of estate planning include
Documenting your wishes
Designating beneficiaries on all insurance policies, retirement accounts, property and POD/TOD on non-retirement accounts
Preparing relevant documents including your will, trust, power of attorney, and other legal documents
Sharing your wishes with trusted advisors and family
If you don't already have intentions around your estate
start with values-based questions, like: What does legacy mean to you? Who do you want to benefit—and how? This helps align your estate plan with your deeper intentions.
The Boldin planner has multiple features that can help to and ensure that your legacy goals such as charitable giving, specific gifts to loved ones, maximizing your estate or reducing taxes for heirs are accounted for. We can also help you identify areas where you may need legal structures (like a trust) to accomplish your wishes.
These are 3 common estate goals and how you can best leverage the Boldin Platform to model them in your plan
Goal 1: Maximize Lifestyle Spending
Use Boldin's Max Spend Withdrawal Strategy to understand how much you can spend above your planned expenses to "die with zero," or limit your lifestyle spending by a specific legacy goal.
Goal 2: Estate Preservation
Goals around estate preservation may include maximizing net worth, reducing taxes, avoiding probate, keeping assets in the family, allocating assets in blended families, unequal distributions and more.
Rely on Boldin's Projected Net Worth Report to learn what you may have at longevity age and think through your options to manage your wealth with legacy and estate goals in mind.
Use the Legacy Goal feature to understand your capacity for charitable gifts and bequests.
Use the Customized Withdrawal Strategy to protect specific assets until the end of the plan for a surviving spouse/partner (if you have one) or heirs (if you do not have a spouse/partner).
Use Disbursements to reduce assets likely to appreciate, so future growth is out of your estate.
Exclude accounts from the Withdrawal Strategy to hold appreciated assets until death so that heirs benefit from the stepped-up basis which allows them to sell with little/no capital gains tax.
If you gift appreciated assets during your lifetime, the recipient gets your cost basis (which could trigger capital gains tax when sold). To model transfer of appreciated shares, set the cost basis of the source account higher than the balance and add a Disbursement for the balance.
Use the Roth Conversion Explorer to determine when and how much of your traditional IRAs to convert traditional IRAs to Roth during your lifetime (especially in lower tax years) and pay the taxes now so your heirs avoid them later. Roth Conversion can help maximize what your beneficiaries receive while minimizing what goes to the IRS.
Goal 3: Charitable Legacy Plan
Use One Time Expenses and Disbursements to account for lifetime giving to individuals up to $19,000 per recipient (2025 limit) annually, gift-tax free.
Use the Detailed Budgeter to account for deductible gifts to Donor Advised Funds, charitable trusts, causes, and organizations during your lifespan. The Planner will compare your standard deduction and deductions on an annual basis and apply the one that’s most beneficial to you.
Use One Time Expenses and Disbursements to model Bequests (money intended to be given upon death to a person or entity other than the surviving spouse).
Include 529 plans to account for Educational Funding for loved ones.
Planner Features
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Legacy Goal | Understand your capacity for legacy planning |
Itemized Deductions | Donations to Charitable Organizations |
Disbursements | Bequests Splits assets equally among heirs, or proportionally |
Excluding an Account from Withdrawal Strategy | Bequests |
Max Spend Withdrawal Strategy | Understand your capacity for lifestyle spending |
Withdrawal Strategies | Optimize your estate for heirs |
Roth Conversions | Optimize your estate for heirs |
✅ Pro Tip
Use the Boldin Planner as a supplement, not a replacement, for legal documents. it helps you organize your estate planning by focusing on values, people, and purpose—not just assets. It's a thinking, planning, and communication tool—your will, trust, power of attorney, and other legal documents must still be
Created by a qualified estate attorney
Stored in a secure location
Shared with trusted advisors and family (as appropriate)
Reviewed annually or after major life events