By Brandon Miller—
I have never once had a client rub their hands together and say, “Brandon, let’s talk about my mortality.” And yet here we are, because estate planning is the one item on your financial to-do list where procrastination sends the bill to the people you love.
Miguel Torres (of Miguel Torres Law) has been Brio’s estate planning attorney partner for more than ten years, and this year we brought him directly into the Brio ecosystem. He’s working alongside our advisors and alongside Shannon Kennedy (who handles the part of this work that has nothing to do with paperwork and everything to do with being human) to better serve our clients.
Do I Need an Estate Plan? Four Reasons You Almost Certainly Do
1. What you have built deserves protecting. There’s a stubborn belief out there that estate planning is for people with a certain number attached to their name, and that’s simply not true. Consider any accounts, a home, children, and loved ones who would be left sorting through your affairs if something happened to you.
2. Probate. Nearly every state in the union will run your family through it if your documents are not in place, and California is no exception. It’s long, public, and lands at exactly the moment your family has the least capacity to deal with anything. A little planning now can spare them most of that, and often all of it.
3. Your estate plan is not just for when you are dead. What happens if you become temporarily incapacitated, and you need someone to help keep things running? That somebody has to call your bank, your insurer, and your mortgage lender, and each of them will ask who they are speaking to. Without a power of attorney and an advance healthcare directive, that person has to petition a judge for the authority to represent you, which takes a month or two in California on a good day.
4. Your family may not match the legal template. The law has not evolved past the eighteenth-century nuclear household, which is a polite way of saying it was not written with many families in mind. This reaches well beyond who inherits what, into who is allowed to visit you in the hospital and who signs off on your care when you can’t speak for yourself. Naming those people now is how you keep the default rules from naming someone else.
How Brio’s Integrated Estate Planning Works
Your Brio advisor and Miguel coordinate directly on titling, beneficiary designations, and legal structures, which means you aren’t the one carrying messages between us. Mention an out-of-state home purchase to Miguel and your advisor hears about it and looks at the financial side. Tell your advisor about a major life change and Miguel refreshes the documents that need refreshing.
Attorney-client privilege stays fully intact. You’ll have a separate contract with Miguel, and while Brio pays for his services, you control what he shares with us and what we share with him. If you’d rather keep something private, you put it in writing and it stays private.
Meet Shannon
Alongside Miguel, you’ll also work with our amazing Shannon Kennedy, Brio’s Director of Community Engagement and Life Plan Specialist, as well as a Certified Senior Advisor®. Consider Shannon your go-to-guide for putting all the non-paperwork pieces into your real life.
Shannon will talk with you about what retirement looks like day to day, what your support system looks like now and how to make it sturdier, where home might be tomorrow, and what would make that home safe. When you nominate an executor, she calls that person to make sure they’re comfortable with the job, because it’s kinder for everyone to know in advance. Then everything gets stored centrally, so the details sit in one place instead of scattered across a lifetime of accounts and passwords.
The Hard Part Isn’t the Paperwork
Nobody arrives at estate planning conversations excited. People do it because they love somebody, and because somewhere in the back of their mind is an image of their family at a kitchen table guessing what they would have wanted. You can trade that image for a much better one, and you don’t have to do it alone.
Book a complimentary Make It Happen meeting to learn more.
This material presented by Brio Financial Group (“Brio”) is for informational purposes only and is not intended to serve as a substitute for personalized investment advice or as a recommendation or solicitation of any particular security, strategy, or investment product. Facts presented have been obtained from sources believed to be reliable, however, Brio cannot guarantee the accuracy or completeness of such information, and certain information presented here may have been condensed or summarized from its original source. Brio does not provide legal or tax advice, and nothing contained in these materials should be taken as legal or tax advice. Advisory services are only offered to clients or prospective clients where Brio and its representatives are properly licensed or exempt from licensure. No advice may be rendered by Brio Financial Group unless a client service agreement is in place. For more information about our advisory services and fees, please refer to our ADV brochure found at https://adviserinfo.sec.gov/
Brandon Miller, CFP®, is a financial consultant at Brio Financial Group in San Francisco, specializing in helping LGBT individuals and families plan and achieve their financial goals. For more information:
Money Matters
Published on August 27, 2026
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