Our Latest Offering: Estate Planning

Once the basic needs of your loved ones and yourself are met, the biggest luxury of all is time. We’re not referring to immortality, but rather hours of leisure time to reflect, do the things we enjoy, slow down to engage with people, and spend time with the ones we love.

For most of us, this desire is in a constant tug-of-war with our goals, our needs, and the effort required to secure our future. It’s as if we wish time would slow down, but since it won’t, we carry on at this pace, taking decisions at various stages on what to drop and what we can delegate.

We don’t have easy solutions for how to slow down time, but what we can offer is to take some worries off your back so you can focus on the more meaningful, higher-level concerns and delights in your life. Over the last few years, we’ve realized that many of our clients don’t tackle their estate planning simply because the complex paperwork is too tedious for them to grapple with, so this issue which should take priority keeps getting postponed instead. Drafting wills are time-consuming, emotional and riddled with complicated tax law considerations – particularly so if you own assets in two countries. However, take a second to consider this: isn’t the financial reward from all these years of hard work wasted if you don’t think this through and make life easier for your loved ones later?

Perhaps this seems more urgent and apparent to us because we handle all the financial and tax reporting on behalf of our clients, and we have a lot of this information with us already. Prabha Srinivasan, our Director and Co-Founder, is concerned that clients don’t address this sooner rather than later.

“I feel obligated to alert our clients to tackle this and to give them a sense of direction in this area precisely because we are already privy to their asset base in both countries and we know where they are headed in life”, she says. “We can make this exercise quite painless with just a few additional inputs from them.”

After handling the process of setting up an estate plan, formulating wills and trusts for a few clients, Ventura Pranas has got a system in place to make the process and the paperwork a lot less cumbersome. We’ve also faced the other side of what this looks like: when a client passes on without a will, the spouse and loved ones have to go through tremendous hardship to accomplish some otherwise very easy steps in being able to access the assets. This experience with a few clients has prepared us to walk future clients through all the potential scenarios they should consider.

The process, you might imagine, isn’t as simple and straightforward as we wish it were. Even when beneficiaries are named, there are tax implications and compliances that need to be considered. The toughest part of this exercise is usually aggregating the information. With most of this information readily available with us, we’re in a competent position to handle this process well.

A well thought-out will smoothens the whole inheritance process and it can help you avoid tax pitfalls. If your assets are in different countries, you’ll need to speak with lawyers at both ends, and no one understands tax laws in the US and in India like we do – it’s what we’ve been examining closely for the last 8 years. You may also need to set up a trust with a lawyer, name a trustee to safeguard the interests of your loved ones, secure your paperwork, and then revisit it every 3 – 5 years as your financial situation evolves.