Five Wealth Planning Strategies to Drive Success in 2025

As we settle into 2025, it’s an ideal time to take a step back, assess your financial goals, and strategize for the year ahead. This moment offers a valuable opportunity to reflect on past decisions, refine your wealth planning approach, and set the stage for success.

Below, we’ve outlined five essential wealth planning strategies designed to help you build a strong foundation for 2025 and beyond. These strategies are crafted to align with your unique personal and family priorities.

Give your fiduciaries a performance review
The people or institutions that you select to administer your estate plan – trustees, executors, and personal representatives – are often as important as the planning vehicles themselves. Take a moment to consider whether your named fiduciaries are still the right people to do the job. Individuals age, move, and retire, and the trustees you selected a decade ago might be in a different stage of life in 2025. Even corporate fiduciaries evolve over time and may no longer be the best choice for your family. Making fiduciary decisions when you have the benefit of time and good health is always better than a last minute or time-pressured decision.

Think strategically about philanthropy
Often the end of the year is focused on completing charitable gifts, frequently recurring in nature, to obtain the corresponding tax deduction or to meet a charity’s deadline. There’s no time to refine a charitable mission, consider how to structure multi-year gifts, or engage other family members. If 2025 is the year that your family wants to take philanthropy to the next level, you might consider the following:

• What appreciated securities are available to fund gifts? Gifting appreciated securities offers greater tax efficiency than cash.
• If you are making philanthropic decisions alone, who else in your family would you like to engage? Philanthropy is an excellent way to begin conversations about wealth and values with the next generation.
• If your giving is inconsistent, would you like to create a long-term charitable plan or a philanthropic mission statement to organize your giving and perhaps increase your impact?
• If you are uncertain about the impact of your giving, should you create or clarify your criteria or framework for giving?

Focus on the why
Understanding the “why” – or the values – that drive decisions about wealth is essential to creating an estate plan that fulfills your legacy. Too often, our focus is on the “how” – how will we reduce estate tax or increase creditor protection or teach kids to save.

The why is much more powerful than the how. The how is easily accessible, but the why can only come from you. Here is how to start:

• Values are often tough to articulate so instead of starting with a list of lofty words, think about your formative experiences with money.
  • For example, what was the first message you heard about money growing up – what did you learn from it, and does it still influence your behavior?
• Next, consider how you spend your resources today:
  • Where do you invest your time, talent, and treasure? Which of these investments is most fulfilling to you?

These answers will likely reveal your motivational values, those deeply-held beliefs that influence your decisions, behaviors, and priorities. Once you can clearly articulate your values, it is easier to share, live, and plan in alignment with what you care most about.

Talk more about money
While communication about wealth and planning is essential to long-term success in wealthy families, most shy away from conversations about money with children and young adults. Many parents feel that they are not prepared for these conversations and fear challenging questions.

To begin, start small, know your limits, and be prepared with questions of your own. If a child asks a question that you aren’t ready to answer – or don’t know how to answer – respond with: “why do you ask?”

The purpose of initial wealth conversations is to increase trust and openness, not to share your full balance sheet! Starting a dialogue and asking your own questions might yield more information than you expect.

Avoid purely tax-driven decisions
In 2025, it might be easy to get swept up in the talk of potential federal tax law changes. The future of the Tax Code is a hot topic in the financial press because the tax cuts created by the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act will sunset in 2026 unless new legislation intervenes.

While surely no one can foresee the political future, GOP control of both houses, as well as a Republican administration, means that we likely have not seen the last of lower rates and higher exemption amounts.

While your SCS team will stay abreast of how the tax law evolves this year, it is not the time to make tax-driven decisions that are not otherwise aligned with your goals and values in order to take advantage of the current tax law.

Next Steps
These strategies can be tailored to your unique financial goals and family priorities. If you’d like to explore how they apply to your situation, reach out to us. Our advisor team is here to help you create a personalized wealth plan for success in 2025. Contact us today to start the conversation.