OUR services

Wills and Estate Planning

We advise on estate planning, including preparation of wills, powers of attorney, guardianship appointments, family trusts, inheritance agreements, mutual will deeds, self-managed superannuation funds and much more.

Whether you require a simple will, or a sophisticated estate planning strategy, we can assist you and your family plan for the future. Book a free consultation with us here.

HCN Law also participates in Cancer Council’s Legal Referral Service which helps people affected by cancer access free legal, financial, and workplace advice, if they cannot afford to pay for it. We are proud to assist people affected by cancer in our community with their legal needs.

Your Estate Plan

We consider that every person’s estate plan should include:

We can offer the above estate plan and documents for as little as $550 for a single person and $990 for a couple (including GST). Our fees for estate planning are always fixed fee and will be quoted to you during our free initial consultation. Please ask us about pensioner discounts and payment plans during our initial consultation to find out how we can help you.

Our Estate Planning process is simple and easy:

• Our free initial consultation (usually between 30 minutes and 1 hour);
  Drafting documents for you to review;
• A follow up meeting (if required) to answer your questions and make amendments;
• Meeting with you in person or via Zoom to sign your documents; and
• Sending certified copies to you via post and/or email. We offer a free safe custody service for your original documents.

Your free initial consultation

We offer a free initial consultation to discuss your estate planning needs. During this meeting we will ask the following questions:

• Information about your family, including your current and previous spouses and your children;
• What are your assets and liabilities (rough estimates are fine at this stage), including your superannuation and whether you have a binding death benefit nomination in place;
• The names of trusted people in your life that you may elect to be your executor, power of attorney appointee and guardianship appointee (including substitute decision makers);
• Whether you would like to exclude a person from your estate that may be able to challenge your will;
• Your preferences regarding the inclusion of sophisticated strategies to minimise tax and maximise asset protection;
• Whether you have any preferences regarding medical treatment should you be unable to make your own medical and lifestyle decisions; and
• Whether you have any preferences regarding your assets if you are unable to make your own decisions about your legal and financial affairs.

Depending on your answers, we may be able to proceed directly to drafting your estate planning documents. If that is the case, we will quote our simple estate planning fee, which is capped at $550 for a single person and $990 for a couple including GST.  If the initial consultation reveals that a sophisticated strategy is required we can provide you with further advice on appropriate strategies. Sophisticated estate planning strategies may be suggested if:

• If there is the potential for a disinherited person to challenge your will;
• You would like to protect vulnerable beneficiaries, such as a person with a disability or a person suffering with addiction;
• You have assets with significant capital gains or you would like to consider strategies to minimise tax paid by your beneficiaries; or
• You would like to ensure your children from a previous relationship are protected.

Drafting and reviewing documents

If you choose to proceed with our services after our initial meeting, we will draft the estate planning documents and either post or email (based on your preference) those documents to you for you to review. We will provide you with our tax invoice at this stage, however, payment is not expected until after we meet with you to sign your documents.

If you are happy with the documents as drafted, we will invite you to make an appointment with us to sign the documents. If you are not close to our office in Maitland, we can execute the documents via a Zoom meeting. If it is inconvenient to travel to our office, we are also able to visit you at your home or office for an additional cost of between $50 and $100 depending on your location.

If you require changes to your documents, or if you would like to discuss the documents further, we can organise a further consultation to discuss the documents and make amendments. Should amendments be required, we will send the amended draft documents for you to review and when you are happy with them, we will invite you to make your final appointment to sign the documents.

Signing your documents

We will meet with you in person or over Zoom to sign your documents. It is important that all of the prescribed actions are completed when signing your Will and other estate planning documents to make sure they are valid and binding. As two witnesses are required to sign your Will, we will invite a second member of our team into the meeting briefly to assist with witnessing.

Posting/emailing certified documents and our Safe Custody offering

After you have signed your estate planning documents we will either post or email certified copies of the documents to you. We offer a free safe custody service whereby we can keep your original documents at our office in our safe at no cost to you.

Contact Maitland Solicitors HCN Law for a no obligation estate planning discussion.