Taking care of everyone

This article was originally published on On Your Own Two Feet ‘s website and has been reproduced here with Helen Baker’s permission.

Just about everyone loves The Brady Bunch – that TV series with the perfect blended family (I’m not a fan of that term). With an estimated one in two marriages in Australia ending in divorce, we are seeing more and more families blending together – his kids, her kids, and their kids.

Take the case of Jack and Jill (not real names). Jack (45) provides well for his family, which is still growing. He earns $250,000 p.a., and has three children from previous marriage. He recently married Jill who is now pregnant with their first child. Jill is divorced but has no children from that marriage and is earning $120,000 p.a..

They came to me looking for direction regarding the future they are building together.

The key areas we needed to focus on were:

• Insurances that protect Jack’s children
• Insurances that protect Jack and Jill’s new family including the mortgage
• Ensuring Jill could still stay at home and look after the baby if anything happened to Jack
• We also needed to ensure there were new Wills in place (marriage voids an old Will in most cases).

We worked through many issues including protecting Jack’s inheritance to his children from his previous marriage while ensuring Jill and his new family had adequate cover in the event something should happen to him.

We needed to ensure both Jill’s and Jack’s Wills got the appropriate superannuation, insurances and investments to the children because if anything happens to Jack and if it all goes to Jill, Jack’s children from his first marriage could potentially receive nothing.

These are tricky ones but with the right focus and chipping away at all of the elements, everyone can be on their own two feet.

Jack and Jill both said, ‘Wow I didn’t realise it was so complicated. Thanks for sorting all this out for us and educating us at the same time’.

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