Planning for your loved ones after your death isn’t the most exciting task on your daily agenda. Be that as it may, it’s essential to find the time to work with a Texas estate planning attorney before tragedy strikes. This is even more important if you happen to own a business.

Your company is probably the most valuable of all your assets. Estate planning helps protect the business and transfer its ownership in accordance with your plans. Those plans could include helping your heirs run the business or to sell said business for as much as possible.

Whatever your plans end up being, here are some tips to help you through the estate planning process.

Draft Your Estate Documents

Some would argue that this tip is so obvious it doesn’t warrant restating. However, we can’t emphasize the importance of drafting a will and other estate documents for entrepreneurs enough. Dealing with a business after the proprietor’s demise is difficult enough. The last thing anyone wants is managing a business in intestacy. Not only is it more expensive, but your business’s future also isn’t certain without a will.

Prepare a Succession Plan

A succession plan enhances the certainty of your business’s future by facilitating a smooth transfer of ownership to your successors. Your succession and estate plans should be in harmony, particularly if you plan to leave the business in a beneficiary’s hands. The plan permits you to train your replacement and decreases the risk of unforeseen problems after you pass.

Life Insurance

If you want your business to close after your demise, additional life insurance can give your beneficiaries enough money to comfortably do that. If you want your business to continue, more life insurance can provide enough capital to cushion your heirs’ transition. Besides life insurance, consider buying disability insurance in the event that you become incapacitated.

Extend Liability Insurance

Continuing the theme of easing your successor’s transition into ownership, you should pay off your business’s liability insurance premiums in advance for some time. This will protect your business from lawsuits in the immediate or near future after your death. It will also make it easier for your successor to adjust, ensuring they aren’t flooded with work as soon as they start.

If you’re looking for an attorney for the estate planning process, get in touch with us, at Mike Massey Law. We provide estate planning attorneys in Houston, Austin, Travis, and Harris County, TX.