How To Get Started

How to get Started

By now you’ve seen that Obenauf Law Group is something special, and because you love your family, you know your family deserves the kind of protection, guidance and love we provide for a lifetime. It’s mportant that you know how we work, because we do things a bit differently at Obenauf Law Group than at other law firms. And our clients love it.

Schedule Your Personal Family Wealth Planning Session

Call our office at 244-3905 to schedule your personal Family Wealth Planning Session and ask to speak with Lindsey, our Client Services Director. Lindsey will schedule the most convenient appointment time available for you to meet with Meg Obenauf. We see clients on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday during business hours and Thursday and Friday evenings, to make planning as convenient for you as possible.

When you schedule your personal Family Wealth Planning Session, we block 2 hours on our calendar so we can focus entirely on you and your family during this time. We will send you a package of information to complete before our time together, which will help you begin the process of getting your legal and financial life in order. During our meeting together, we will guide you to gently look at what would happen for your loved ones and with your assets if something were to happen to you. And then, we’ll look at what you want to happen and help you create a roadmap to get that plan in place as easily as possible. Clients routinely say “wow, if we had known how easy this would be, we would have done it years ago!” after meeting with us.

Our Family Wealth Planning Session is $750 and if we create a comprehensive plan for you, that planning fee is applied to your legal fees for your lifetime estate plan. In some circumstances, we will waive the planning session fee and instead you can secure your appointment time with a credit card number.

In such cases, so long as you keep your appointment, nothing will be charged on your card unless you decide to proceed with a comprehensive estate plan after the Family Wealth Planning Session. In such a situation, if you must cancel within 1 week of your appointment, your credit card will still not be charged unless you fail to reschedule your appointment within 30 days of your cancellation. If you cannot keep your appointment and you choose not to reschedule, your credit card would be charged.

We understand that this policy of securing your appointment with a credit card may seem unique. So is our law firm. We provide our very best service to those families who are looking for a long-term relationship with their trusted advisor. We expend most of our energy providing an exceedingly high degree of service to our existing clients and limit the number of new clients we see each week. We only take referrals from trusted Professional Planning Partners. As a result, we must secure your appointment time so that if something comes up and you can’t attend your appointment, we will have enough
advance notice to open the slot to a waiting family.

What to Do Prior to Your Personal Family Wealth Planning Session

About 3 days after scheduling your appointment, you will receive a Mailer with your Family Wealth Inventory & Assessment and other important information that you will want to review prior to your personal Family Wealth Planning Session. We must have your Family Wealth Inventory & Assessment returned to our office 3 days prior to
your Session either by mail, fax or electronic mail or we will need to reschedule your Session. Feel free to call the office at any time if you need assistance completing your worksheet or have any questions at all.

If you have existing estate planning documents, please make sure that we have your existing documents in our office at least a week before your meeting so that we can review them prior to meeting with you.

What to Expect the Day of Your Personal Family Wealth Planning Session

On the day of your meeting, please expect to spend up to 2 hours with Meg. The initial meeting with Meg has two purposes:

1. To identify whether there is a good fit between you and your attorney and

2. To educate you about the law and what would happen if you died with your current (or no) plan in place.

By looking at what would happen under your current plan, you can identify what you would want to happen differently and then together with Meg’s guidance make the decisions that are necessary to give you the peace of mind of knowing your family would be taken care of in the way you want if something happened to you.

Assuming that you and your attorney determine that there is a good fit between our firm and your family AND that you identify specific ways you would want things to happen that are different than what would happen if something happened to you, you and Meg can design a plan for your family right away.

What Happens Next?

Once you and Meg have completed the design of your plan, you will meet with our plan coordinator who will review your assets for the purpose of ensuring that everything you own will be titled for maximum protection and then schedule a meeting for you to sign your planning documents approximately 4 weeks later.

We have a process of reviewing your documents with you that makes your plan so easy to understand that you will know for certain that we understood exactly the way you want things to happen when something happens to you and that your loved ones will be in excellent hands with our firm. Once you sign your planning documents, your assets and your family are protected as discussed during your design meeting.

We see that as only the beginning of our relationship. You may make changes to your planning documents at no charge for up to 90 days after you sign your documents.

At our final meeting during the planning stage of our relationship, we verify that all of your asset transfers are moving forward on track whether we are taking the lead or you are taking the lead with our guidance. We review your asset spreadsheet with you and ensure all of your questions are answered. Of course, if they aren’t or they become cloudy later on, we are always available to answer your questions at any time in the future. And, there’s no charge for that.

What Happens After I Sign My Estate Planning Documents and Take Them Home?

After the planning phase is complete, the maintenance phase of your plan will begin. At no additional charge, we review your plan at least every three years and keep you informed about changes in the law and about other issues that affect your family and your wealth. And, if you participate in one of our Family Wealth VIP Membership programs, you will have an opportunity to review your plan on an annual basis, and we will provide your family with a number of other valuable services. Call us today to learn about the Membership Programs. Finally, we are always here for you and we don’t charge you for phone calls, faxes, or emails. We welcome your communications!

You’ll be amazed at how easy and painless the entire planning process will be for your family.

Call us today! 244-3905

Getting Started: Why Work With Obenauf Law Group

Before Hiring an Estate Planning Lawyer, Understand the Difference

Many estate planning attorneys take a “one-size fits all” approach with their clients; they do this so that they can work with as many people as possible in a short period of time. One problem with this is that the client has an impersonal experience; but worse than that, this way of planning can lead to unintended results in the long run for the family.

When lawyers do not take the time to listen and consider a family’s personal circumstances, the result is that your Will & Trust Documents do not end up reflecting what your family really wants to happen. And usually there is no review or updating, so the plan quickly becomes outdated and does not work when your family needs it most.

So even though you may pay less up front to get a standard set of documents (or even documents that are customized for your family), things end up much more expensive in the long run. Plus, you leave your family at risk of having to deal with an expensive, unnecessary court process during a time of tremendous grief.

Obenauf Law Group is right for you if you want to know that your plan will actually work when you and your loved ones need it the most. If all you want is a set of legal documents, there are plenty of online resources you can use to create them. Or you can go to a traditional estate planning lawyer.

If what you want is to know you’ve got a plan in place that will make things easy for your loved ones no matter what happens when, we’re the right fit for you.

Here are some of the ways we are different from most estate planning lawyers:

1. All of our fees are fixed fees agreed to in advance, so there are no surprises. At our initial meeting you will choose the level of planning and fee that works best for your family, so there will never be any surprises.

2. We keep you informed and make sure your plan works. We don’t just prepare a set of legal documents for you and send you on your way. We make sure your assets are owned in the right way, we make sure your kids’ well-being is properly planned for, we ensure everyone you’ve named in your plan knows what to do if anything happens to you.

3. We review your plan at least every 3 years and annually through our Family Wealth VIP Membership program. We foster a lifetime, ongoing relationship with our clients. Throughout your life, things change. You change; your assets change; your family changes; the law definitely will change.

4. We have a whole team in place to answer your quick questions and to make the planning process incredibly easy and painless for you and your family. We have a process for helping you make sure that your assets are titled in the right way, both now and over your lifetime.

5. We help you get your legal and financial house in order by helping you make smart choices about things like buying insurance, saving for college, and retirement planning so you never spend more than you have to
or get taken advantage of by unscrupulous salespeople.

6. Legacy Planning. We believe that planning is about much more than just the transfer of your financial wealth. With all of our plans, we include a process to help you transfer your most important personal wealth to your loved ones, including your intellectual, spiritual and human assets – who you are and what’s important to you.

Before you engage an estate planning lawyer to help you plan for the well‐being of your money, your family and your life, there are questions you need to ask. You need to ensure that the estate plan you put in place will really work when your family needs it and won’t end up just a pile of worthless paper after you are gone.

Don’t let a set of legal documents become false security that keeps you from doing what’s best for your loved ones.

Our Unique Approach

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Explaining to you how we’re 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 oftentimes make things seem very complicated and confusing. You’ll have a good idea that the lawyer is smart and seems to know what he’s 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 that you’ve got that taken care of.

You’ll take your fancy planning binder home, stick it on a shelf or in a drawer, mark estate planning off on your checklist as DONE and never think about it again.

You might remember your lawyer said something about moving your bank accounts into the trust. So you’ll go to the bank, forget what you were supposed to do, call your lawyer’s office, get a voicemail, have to leave the bank and wait for a call back, (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 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 her contact information. 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 and 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.

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.

OUR FIRM HELPS YOU PREPARE FOR LIFE

What makes our firm different is that we were built with the needs of growing families in mind. We understand you are BUSY, you are growing, you are planning for a life of prosperity and you value ease, convenience and efficiency. 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 children would be taken care of in the best way possible and will be prepared to receive your wealth if anything happens to you.

That is our focus as well. We’ve developed unique systems to give you the same access to a personal family lawyer as was previously only available to the likes of Bill Gates, Warren Buffet, and Sam Walton so you can have the guidance you need to build and maintain a life of prosperity and wealth.

We encourage communication with our clients. In fact, we’ve thrown out the time clocks so you never have to be afraid to call with a quick question (or even a not so quick question). Everything we do is billed on a flat-fee basis, agreed to in advance, so there are never any surprises.

We have a whole team to serve you. When you call our office to ask your quick question, you won’t have to wait hours or days for a phone call back. You’ll get your question answered, right away. And, if you need to schedule a more in-depth legal or strategic call with your personal lawyer, a call will be scheduled when your both available and ready for the call so we can make the very best use of your time and not waste your time by leaving voicemail after voicemail back and forth.

We ensure the most important details of your planning are followed through on and your plan continues to work throughout your lifetime.

We’ve created unique membership programs to keep your plan up to date year in and year out as well as give you access to our Trusted Team of Legal Experts for guidance on ANY legal or financial matter. One day you will need a lawyer. I don’t know why and I don’t know when, but when you do, you will be grateful you can call on us and we’ll be here to advise you or get you out of a jam.

Lastly, we believe your financial wealth is only about a quarter of your overall “Family Wealth” which is made up of your far more valuable, Intellectual, Spiritual and Human assets – who you are and what’s important to you.

Most estate plans are only able to transfer your financial wealth onto the next generation. The intangible nature of your much greater wealth has made it difficult to capture and it is most often lost when someone passes. 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, you know very little. But, the wealthiest families capture these assets and pass them along right with their financial wealth. And, that’s part of the reason the rich keep getting richer.

We’ve developed a tool that allows us to pass 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 when you come into meet with your personal family lawyer.

We look forward to seeing you and caring for your family soon!