Watch and listen to our webinar “His, Hers and Ours: Estate Planning in a Blended Family” hosted Hosted by Margaret Rintoul a partner with Blaney McMurtry LLP.

Blended families are almost the norm in today’s world, but the financial and estate planning issues that such families encounter are tricky. Maximizing savings for income and estate administration taxes can mean that children from earlier relationships get little or nothing from a parent’s estate. Providing for children born into the second relationship, often much younger than children from the first relationship, can be equally difficult in terms of balancing the best interests of all the children. Setting up long term trusts for the benefit of a surviving spouse in order to protect capital for children of the first relationship means a potentially long term relationship where someone has to remain responsible for managing and distributing assets to a spouse and later to the children, with potentially difficult relationships developing over the time.