Estate Planning For Forest Landowners PDF Download

Conveyance of private forest land to the next generation has been a topic of interest for natural resource agencies, practitioners, land trusts, local conservancies, and academics for the past two decades. This interest has risen for important reasons, which include research that indicates 35 percent of the nations forests (263 million acres) are held by family forest owners, the average age of these owners from national and state level studies is near retirement age, and these owners, while interested in passing their land onto their heirs and having it remain in the family, are not engaging in long-term estate planning process to achieve this outcome. Concurrently, data indicates land-use decisions continue to consume more of this acreage for human infrastructure, that the rate of changing ownerships has increased, and that the negative impacts of forest parcelization and fragmentation are most likely to occur coincidental with ownership change.Forest legacy planning is seen as a pathway to protect and sustain the values and long-term goals of current owners. Forest legacy planning is essentially long-term estate planning focused on forest conservation-oriented outcomes. There is a limited but developing body of work that has investigated forest landowners future intentions, which recognizes challenges and barriers they face and reasons why they fail to engage in planning activities such as perceived cost, not knowing where to start, a lack of experienced planning professionals, and insufficient time to complete planning activities, among others. Educational and outreach extension materials about forest legacy and estate planning present process overviews for developing a plan, describe various legal tools for asset protection, and recommend types of professionals to engage and provide case studies. Yet, there remains a deficit in the existing literature that identifies and demonstrates the process a forest owner will experience working with the planning professionals in developing strategies and plans to achieve the forest legacy outcome.This research project addresses this deficit by engaging planning professionals to understand and delineate this process in two key sectors: estate attorneys and financial planners. The qualitative study employed grounded theory methodology to explore the process used to engage with clients on estate planning with a forest legacy focus. Results of the study identified four emergent theoretical categories of the professional planning process. These are the core category of Conservation Stewardship Forest Land Transfer and three sub-core categories of Family Forest Owner Relational Decision Space, Advisor Fidelity and Efficacy, and Interposing Factors. Additionally, three related contextual categories - Ownership Elements, Tactics, and Planning Suspended - contributed to the final model from the integration of research-based and supplemental data from existing outreach and educational materials. The resulting model represents the important planning process stages forest owners encounter in developing a forest legacy plan.