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You Know Your Clients. We Help Make Sure the People Around Them Know What Matters
Some of the most important questions about aging aren’t answered by an estate plan, a financial plan, or a medical directive. An attorney can make sure the right legal authority exists. A financial advisor can help determine whether the resources are there. A physician can explain medical choices. But none of them can answer the client’s most personal questions.
For more than 20 years, Melissa and I worked with older adults and families in an elder law and estate planning practice recognized as Northern Nevada’s best elder law firm for 3 consecutive years. Over time, we discovered something surprising: the hardest decisions families face aren’t legal decisions.
They’re questions every family eventually faces:
- How much should the people I love sacrifice to take care of me?
- When is it time to accept help or even leave the home I love?
- Will the people who may someday decide for me actually know what matters most to me?
- How do families like mine end up in conflict, even when everyone loves each other?
Sometimes your clients are already asking these questions: “I don’t want my kids to have to figure all of this out someday.” Or “We have our estate plan, but we’ve never really talked about what happens if one of us needs help.”
More often, families don’t realize these questions need to be answered until they are facing them in the middle of a crisis. By then, uncertainty can become conflict, guilt, and burnout - even among people who love each other.
We work alongside the professionals your clients already trust to help them have those conversations now - while they can think about them carefully, talk with the people who matter, and make their own choices.
The result is an Aging Well Plan that gives the client’s family, decision-makers, and professional advisors something legal and financial documents alone cannot provide: Guidance about what matters and why.
Let’s Talk About Working Together
Why Aging Well Planning Adds Value To Your Work
| Understanding What Matters Beyond the Documents | Difficult Decisions Have Context | Families Have Something to Come Back To | It Complements the Work You Already Do |
| Structured Aging Well conversations give clients the time and setting to talk about priorities, concerns, relationships, and tradeoffs that don’t always emerge during legal, financial, or medical planning. | No plan can anticipate every future circumstance. When something happens that wasn’t anticipated, families and advisors have more than documents and isolated instructions. They have a framework for understanding what matters to the client and how they thought about difficult choices. | When family members, decision-makers, or professionals see a situation differently, they can come back to the client’s own values and reasoning. | We don’t replace the client’s attorney, financial advisor, physician, fiduciary, or other professionals. Aging Well Planning addresses a different part of the client’s planning: the human guidance that helps everyone understand how legal authority, financial resources, medical recommendations, and care options should serve the life the client wants to live. |
Who We Work With ?
We work with professionals who know and care about older adults and their families - and who recognize that good planning requires more than any one discipline can provide.
Financial Advisors & Wealth Managers
Helping connect the client’s financial planning and resources to the life those resources are intended to support.
Estate Planning & Elder Law Attorneys
Adding the client’s values, priorities, and reasoning to the legal framework, providing guidance when the documents themselves don’t provide the answer.
Professional
Fiduciaries
Giving a future decision-maker a much deeper understanding of the person behind the documents and the principles the client wants reflected in future decisions.
Senior Living & Home Care Professionals
Helping clients think about independence, care, home, family involvement, and acceptable tradeoffs before a transition becomes urgent.
CPAs & Other Trusted Advisors
Helping connect the human side of aging with the other professional planning already
surrounding the client.
Working Together
We want to understand your work, the clients you serve, and the situations you encounter. Just as importantly, you should understand what we do, what we don’t do, and when involving us may be useful.
Aging Well Planning doesn’t create another professional silo. We don’t draft legal documents, provide investment advice, make medical recommendations, or replace care professionals. We work alongside the professionals your clients already know and trust, while staying clearly within our role.
When an Aging Well conversation identifies a need outside our role, we help the client recognize it and connect with the appropriate member of their existing team whenever possible.
Want To Know More About Aging Well Planning?
Learn more about our process, the Five Conversations, and the Aging Well Plan
Our Services
Let’s Talk About The Clients You’re Already Thinking About
Chances are that you already know a client or family who has raised some of these questions.
Let’s spend 20 minutes talking about the situations you encounter and where Aging Well Planning might be useful to the clients and families you work with.
Schedule an Introductory Conversation!
Richard P. Schulze, JD, MBA
Founder, Schulze Elder Life Planning