The Cruz Law Difference
Explaining to you how Cruz Law is different requires an explanation of what the “traditional” experience with a lawyer is like. If you’ve worked with a lawyer to prepare estate planning documents for you in the past, this will sound familiar.
During the traditional experience, you’ll go in and meet with a lawyer who will often make things seem very complicated and confusing. You’ll have a good idea your lawyer is smart and seems to know what they are doing, so you’ll nod and answer questions as if you understand everything. Because you want to do the right thing for your family, you’ll have the lawyer prepare documents for you and you’ll sign the documents, feeling relieved you got that taken care of.
You’ll take your fancy estate planning binder full of documents home, stick it on a shelf or in a drawer, mark estate planning off of your checklist as DONE, feel good, and never think about it again.
You might remember your lawyer said something about moving your bank accounts into your trust. So, you’ll go to the bank, forget what you were supposed to do, call your lawyer’s office and get a voicemail, leave the bank and wait for a callback (which takes several hours at least and sometimes days), and by that time you’ll have gotten busy with other things and never get around to moving that bank account.
A few weeks later, you’ll get a bill in the mail for $67.50 for 15 minutes of your lawyer’s time for answering a couple of questions. You’ll make a mental note – don’t call my lawyer ever again.
Several years later, you’ll refinance your house or sell it and buy a new one and forget that you were supposed to let your lawyer know or make sure you kept the title in the name of the trust. Your children will get older, making your guardianship choices outdated, but you don’t want to call your lawyer because you know you’ll get a bill in the mail two weeks later.
You’ll hear something about a change in the tax law, but you figure you’d surely get a letter in the mail from your lawyer if it was something that affected you, so you don’t worry about it. And, you’d have to dig through boxes to find your trust documents so you could remember your lawyer’s name and find his or her contact information. And who has time for that?
It’s not until you become incapacitated or die and your family finds the binder you stuck up on a shelf several years before and never looked at again, that they’ll realize your plan is so outdated that it has nothing to do with your life, your assets, or the law. Your family is at a loss. They don’t know where to turn or what to do, so they contact the same lawyer you used to prepare the documents, who is as happy as can be to probate your assets, which never made it into the trust.
How do I know this?
Because it happens all the time to families and to business owners, including some close friends of mine, and I swore it would never happen to my clients when I created my own firm. Unfortunately, what I have discovered is that the estate planning industry was not designed to serve growing families who experience lots of change on their way to success. It was designed to serve 70- and 80-year-olds who were preparing for death.
Cruz Law Helps You Prepare for Life
What makes Cruz Law different is that I built it with the needs of growing families in mind. I understand that you are busy, you are growing, and you are planning for a life of prosperity. You value ease, convenience, and efficiency. You are raising children, caring for elderly parents, all the while you're working hard to build your own nest egg for a lifetime of support. You want to know you’ve made the best decisions for your family and that your plan will work when your loved ones need it most. You want to make sure your minor children will be raised by the people you choose, and never by anyone you wouldn’t want, and that your teens and adult children are properly prepared to care for you and what you leave behind.
You want to feel confident that you’ve made the right choices and handled everything so that you aren’t leaving behind a mess when something happens.
That is my focus as well. I've developed unique systems to give you the same access to a Family Business Lawyer® as was previously only available to the super-wealthy so that you can have the guidance you need to build and maintain a life of prosperity and wealth. And, to keep your family out of court and out of conflict, which is the greatest risk to the people you love and all you have created, even if you’ve already worked with a traditional lawyer or created documents online.
Cruz Law is Here for You
I encourage communication with my clients. In fact, I've thrown out the time clocks so you never have to be afraid to call with a quick question. Everything I do is billed on a flat fee basis and is agreed to in advance, so there are never any surprises.
When you call Cruz Law to ask your quick question, you won’t have to wait hours or days for a return phone call. And, if you need to schedule a more in-depth legal or strategic call with your Family Business Lawyer®, a call will be scheduled when we're both available and ready so as to make the very best use of your time, rather than wasting it by leaving voicemail after voicemail back and forth.
Cruz Law ensures the most important details of your planning are followed through on and that your plan continues to work throughout your lifetime. Cruz Law will also ensure that your assets are owned the right way throughout your life so that none of your assets will end up going through a long, expensive court process or will be lost to the state because they were missed after your death.
Cruz Law has unique membership programs to keep your plan up to date, year in and year out while providing you with access to legal expertise for guidance on your legal or financial matters.
Cruz Law Helps You Transfer Your "Family Wealth"
Lastly, I believe your financial wealth is only a small part of your overall “Family Wealth,” which is made up of your far more valuable – and most often lost upon incapacity or death – intellectual, spiritual and human assets. These assets are what make you who you are, and sum up what’s most important to you. And, a survey of inheritors has revealed that what they care about even more than inheriting your money is inheriting these intangible assets.
Most estate plans only focus on the transfer of your financial wealth to the next generation. Most people have such great intentions of passing on the intangible, but very few ever get around to it. It’s just not a priority – and then it’s too late. How much do you know about your grandparents’ values? Their most prized personal possessions? How they felt about you? What they had learned during their lifetime?
If you are like most people, including me, you know very little of these details. That’s why I've built the capture and passage of these most valuable assets into every estate plan I create. Not only will I help you pass on your money, but also your values, your insights, your stories, and your experience – the truly valuable assets your loved ones care about the most.
Cruz Law captures and passes on your whole family wealth, including your Intellectual, Spiritual, and Human assets. I can’t go into all of the details here, but we’ll definitely talk about it when you come in for your Family Wealth Planning Session. Book your planning session by clicking here now.
P.S. – if you think this all sounds expensive, well, you're right and you’re wrong. I can guarantee you that if you qualify to meet with a Family Business Lawyer®, planning is substantially less costly than it would be for your family if you become incapacitated or die with a plan that doesn’t work, or if you don’t have a plan in place at all. And, I’ve never had a single family who believed in this kind of planning and wanted to put it in place for their loved ones to leave my office because they couldn’t afford it. I’ve made creative financing available to my clients because I know that this planning is the foundation for a life of success!