Business Succession in Your New Jersey Estate Plan
Do you currently own a business or have substantial business interests that you want to pass down to your children, grandchildren, or other loved ones or trusted associates? If so, business succession strategies should be part of your estate planning process. What does business succession look like in New Jersey, and what will you need to do in order to plan ahead so that your business does not die with you? Consider the following information from our New Jersey estate planning attorneys.
Know What You Want to Happen With Your Business
Before you meet with an estate planning attorney in Summit to discuss business succession strategies, it is important to have a firm idea about what you want to happen with your business. For example, do you want someone in your family to inherit the business so that it remains in the family? Or do you want to have options in place for allowing a family member to liquidate and sell the business? You should also have a sense of how you want inherited ownership to work, and whether you want to leave the business to one or multiple parties. If the latter, how do you want each party’s inheritance to impact their control of the business?
Have Your Business Valued or Appraised
You will likely need to have your business valued or appraised to determine its fair market value, and this is something that your estate planning attorney can help you with.
Understand How Your Business Structure May Impact Succession
It will also be important to understand the structure of your business and how that structure may impact subsequent ownership of the business. Your estate planning lawyer can discuss succession and transfer for sole proprietorships, partnerships, limited liability companies (LLCs), and corporations.
Identify the Parties to Inherit Your Business
You will need to determine who, specifically, you want to inherit your business or business interests, and how you want business interests to be divided between or among those parties if you have more than one person in mind.
Make Business Succession Part of Your Estate Plan
Finally, the most important thing when it comes to business succession is to make it a key component of your estate planning process. Whether you already have a will and a revocable living trust and now want to consider business succession, or you are starting all of your estate planning from the beginning, you will want to think about business succession in relation to your other assets and how your beneficiaries will inherit.
Contact a Summit, New Jersey Estate Planning Attorney for Assistance with Your Business Succession Strategies
Many residents of the Summit area are successful business owners and want to ensure that their companies are passed down to children and grandchildren carefully and effectively. Our firm works closely with Summit residents on various aspects of estate planning, including matters pertaining to business succession. One of the experienced Summit estate planning lawyers at Dempsey, Dempsey & Sheehan can speak with you today about your current business succession and estate planning needs, and we can begin working with you on strategies and tools particular to those needs. Contact our firm today to learn more about how we can assist you.
Source:
law.justia.com/codes/new-jersey/title-3b/
