You’ve worked hard to accumulate what you own over your lifetime – and you’re right to want to protect it. Ensuring that your wealth stays with you and your family into the future is a motivation shared by many Australians, and it’s important to know how to ensure this happens with the least impact to your hard-earned assets. Here are a few tips on protecting your wealth for the future.

Insurance is vital to ensuring your family is protected in worst-case scenarios – but in the meantime, premiums are an additional expense that may be subtracting unnecessarily from your wealth – in some cases dramatically so if you hold multiple covers or are being charged for excessive benefits. However, should disaster strike, the right level of cover for you will help to shield your wealth from the financial impact by covering medical expenses or providing for your family’s ongoing expenses in the future.

To find out the cover that’s right for you, it’s worth checking with a professional to assess your current position, ensuring it’s a good fit for your future goals.

Ensuring your beneficiaries are up to date is extremely important to safeguarding wealth for your family, as life can be unpredictable – if your beneficiaries are out of date, you may be exposing your wealth people who are no longer part of your life should the worst happen. This tip also applies to your power-of-attorneys and executors for the same reason.

Beneficiaries may also not be quite as effective as you would think, depending on the type of nomination. The only nomination that is foolproof is a valid Binding Death Benefit Nomination, as any other form of nomination is subject to the discretion of your trustee or executor when dividing funds, despite any “best intentions” of a Non-Binding nomination. It is also important to note if your Binding Nomination is Lapsing or not – if it is, you will need to renew it on a 3 yearly basis lest it revert to a non-binding beneficiary and expose your wealth to scrutiny in the event of your passing.

One of the best ways to protect your wealth long-term is to set up a will through an estate planner. Whilst post-office will kits are available cheaply, you often get what you pay for. For instance, they may not cover the full range of eventualities that could occur, they may not cover your entire assets pool (such as Superannuation, Business Assets, Investments or Insurances) and finally, they expose the final Will to a greater risk of being challenged based on the deceased’s perceived lack of knowledge or understanding of the implications involved in the authoring of such a document.

An estate planner can talk you through more than just your will however, and can also help you address your protection of assets, income and beneficiaries, ensuring you are paying a reasonable level of taxation, as well as helping to address any potential legal matters that may result from dividing your estate.

Joint finances may seem like a great measure of trust in a relationship, however it can lead to a lot of bad blood in the event of either person’s death, as the remaining party receives full ownership of the funds, essentially cutting the share from the estate of the deceased. On the other hand, if two people individually hold a portion of the funds, the portion belonging to the deceased may still be gifted to beneficiaries of their estate.