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
- Creditor and ex-spouse exposure
- Conflicting advice from advisors
- Doubts over fulfillment of your wishes
- Exposure to large federal estate tax
- Multigenerational education funding
- Complicated trust documents
Solutions
- Strategically formed entities (i.e. LLC)
- Asset protection trusts
- Expert, unconflicted estate guidance
- Strategic estate valuation discounting
- Multigenerational Dynasty Trust
- Generation-skipping tax planning
Benefits
- You remain in control
- Shielded from creditors and ex-spouses
- Clear, consistent guidance
- Reduce or eliminate federal estate tax exposure
- Preserve multigenerational wealth
- Peace of mind
Meet Mike
Estate planning at FirsTrust treats wealth as more than a number, it includes 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.
Mike is a Certified Financial Planner® with a degree in psychology, a master’s certificate in finance, a JurisMaster of Law degree, and 40 years of expertise in trusts & estates.
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 Personal Financial Website includes a cloud-based document vault: a centralized storage for medical directives, healthcare declarations, wills, trusts, entity documents, insurance policies, and key account information.
Secure, Permission-Based Access
By simply sharing your Document Vault password, secure access to your entire financial and estate profile becomes available to your spouse, heirs, trustees or other fiduciary professionals - instantly, 24/7, from anywhere.
Immediate Access When Needed
Your family and fiduciaries can access your complete estate plan digitally at any time. No physical document searches, no delays, no coordination gaps.
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.
Ready to see if we're the right fit?
If your wealth has grown beyond what simple advice can manage, we should talk.
Trust & Estate FAQ
A will is just one piece of an estate plan. A complete plan can also include powers of attorney, healthcare directives, beneficiary designations, and sometimes trusts. Together, these documents help protect you if you’re alive but incapacitated, and ensure your wishes are carried out efficiently after you’re gone.
A will is a list of your instructions to a probate court for how you would like your property to be inherited. A trust is a legal arrangement that holds title to certain assets during your lifetime and then instructs a Trustee how to distribute them after you're gone. Because no probate court is required, it affords you greater privacy, fewer post-mortem costs and delays, and the flexibility to add tax and asset protections.
It's not just about estate taxes. The higher, now-permanent federal exemption (rising to $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.