Estate Planning Coordination for Families in Dallas–Fort Worth, TX

Without a plan, Texas has one for you. Die without the right documents and state law decides who gets what, on its schedule, through probate: a public, court-supervised process your family manages while they're grieving. Even with a will, anything that passes through it becomes part of the public record. Most families we meet assume the documents they signed years ago still steer everything. The account paperwork often says otherwise.

Getting it there is the easy part. Making sure it actually lasts once you're gone is the part most plans never touch. And lasting comes down to four things, only one of which a typical estate plan handles.

The first is protection. Money received outright becomes your child's asset the moment it lands, exposed to a divorce, a lawsuit, a failed business, or a creditor. Left in a properly structured trust instead of handed over outright, it can be far harder for those claims to reach. Texas law generally treats assets kept properly titled in a trust as harder to reach than assets inherited directly. Structuring that trust is your attorney's job. Making sure the question gets asked is ours.

The second is values. An inheritance is more than a number, and wealth built in one generation is famously gone by the third. Usually not because the money ran out, but because the money values that built it, the discipline, the patience, the principles, were never handed down with it. Heirs who understand what the wealth was for tend to steward it very differently than heirs who simply receive it.

The third is tax. Today the federal estate tax exemption sits around $15 million per person, historically high, and made permanent by the 2025 tax law.¹ It hasn't always been there. In the late 1990s it was as low as $600,000, with a rate as high as 55% on everything above the line. Today that rate is 40%.² Exemptions move with the law, and for a larger or growing estate, often a business owner's, planning ahead of that bill is what keeps a legacy from becoming a tax event.

The fourth is direction. The beneficiary form on your IRA, 401(k), or life insurance overrides your will and your trust entirely. If it hasn't been updated since your first marriage or before your grandchildren were born, it can quietly send your money to the wrong person, whatever your other documents say. And a trust only controls what has actually been retitled into it.

In nearly every second opinion review Third Act runs, at least one of these four is unaddressed. Not because these families were careless, but because most estate planning answers the first question, hands over the documents, and calls the job done.