Trust & Estate Services
Create clarity, safeguard against vulnerabilities, and ensure that your wealth is passed forward with fidelity to the vision of those who built it.
Fulfill Your Legacy Objectives
The gift of thoughtful estate planning today can create, protect, and sustainably provide for the healthcare, education, and overall comfort of multiple generations.
Issues
- Federal estate tax exposure
- Creditor and divorce vulnerability
- Unstructured wealth succession
- Wealth dilution across generations
Solutions
- Multigenerational Dynasty Trust
- Family entity structuring
- Asset protection trusts
- Illiquid asset discounting
- Generation-skipping tax planning
Benefits
- Creditor and litigation insulation
- Enforceable, unambiguous wealth transfer
- Estate tax elimination or reduction
- Multigenerational wealth continuity
Meet Mike
Estate planning at FirsTrust treats wealth as more than a number. It carries the values and principles of those who built it. With a background spanning psychology, finance, and law, Mike coordinates your long-term estate vision, fosters alignment among family members, and safeguards your multigenerational legacy.
Michael T. Koenig, CFP®, J.M.
Founded FirsTrust in 1995 and leads its trust and estate practice. Forty years designing multigenerational structures for families with complex estates. CFP®, Juris Master.
Your Estate Plan, Always Accessible
When your family needs access to your estate documents, everything should be organized, digital, and available immediately.
Centralized Storage
Your document vault holds medical directives, healthcare declarations, wills, trusts, entity documents, insurance policies, and key account information in one place.
Secure, Permission-Based Access
Access can be extended to your spouse, heirs, trustees, or other fiduciary professionals with permissions you control, so the people who need your documents can reach them the moment they need to.
Simplicity of Transition
A seamless, organized transfer of wealth starts with having everything your family and fiduciaries need in one place. When every document, account, and directive is accessible, the next generation can move forward with clarity and confidence.
Trust & Estate FAQ
It's not just about estate taxes. The higher, now-permanent federal exemption ($15 million per person / $30 million per couple in 2026) means fewer families will owe federal estate tax, but many states still have their own estate or inheritance taxes with much lower thresholds. Planning is still essential for asset protection, some states' estate taxes, income taxes on heirs, business succession, and making sure wealth is used wisely across generations.
Yes. The ownership of your business is a taxable asset of your estate, and that ownership must transfer according to your estate plan to be valid and effective. True business succession also requires extra attention and documentation, such as buy-sell agreements, updated operating or shareholder agreements, and carefully coordinated trust and beneficiary designations, to help ensure the enterprise itself continues smoothly.
Yes. With the right asset-protection planning, you can leave assets to your children in a way that shields those funds from future risks such as divorce, lawsuits, and creditor claims. Properly structured trusts and carefully drafted distribution rules give your children access to the inheritance while keeping the underlying assets better protected than if they received everything outright in their own names.
A dynasty trust is an irrevocable trust designed to last across multiple generations. Florida's Trust Code permits trust durations of up to 1,000 years (extended from the former rule against perpetuities in 2022). Assets placed in a dynasty trust can grow outside of any beneficiary's taxable estate while providing distributions for health, education, maintenance, and support. The trust also provides creditor protection and divorce protection for beneficiaries. Design and funding of a dynasty trust involve complex tax and legal considerations, including generation-skipping transfer tax planning. Your team coordinates with your estate attorney on these structures.
The Trust & Estate specialist on your team acts as the architect of your estate plan, and works alongside your estate planning attorney to draft the documents.