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For young adults, heading off to college often represents a major transition into adulthood and independence. One aspect of this transition is understanding the importance of financial well-being. By knowing the basics of personal finances and creating clear goals, students can set themselves up to succeed during and after their college years. Here are some tips—including building a credit history and organizing estate planning and other essential documents—for college students to consider.

Helping an elderly parent adjust to their changing needs and circumstances can be challenging for both parties. While parents are adapting to major lifestyle changes, their children are often relied on to help make important decisions about their care. To ease this potentially challenging transition, this checklist contains a series of topics you can discuss with your loved one.

Having to say goodbye to a loved one is never easy—and if you are authorized to make financial decisions on behalf of them, you may face even more challenges. Closing out someone’s personal, financial, and legal affairs while grieving their loss can be stressful, so consider using this checklist as a step-by-step guide to help stay on track.

At some point on your family journey and through the key life stages, you may take a step back and realize the wealth and legacy you’ve created are going to live on for generations. As you begin to reflect, you can look to the legacy and estate planning guide in this Digest as a starting point. You’ll also find helpful checklists, thoughtful questions, and perspectives to prepare for the generational transition—including how to talk with your heirs about their inheritance.

Families of wealth often want to help their relatives financially but are justifiably concerned about what those individuals will do with the money and how having access to significant sums might affect their values and behavior. While making family trust distributions is a way to provide discretionary income, it’s a framework that gives the trustee control over when and how much money to give to a beneficiary. However, that process is not collaborative.

From aiding grandchildren to purchase their first homes, to empowering children or other loved ones to build their personal balance sheets through investing in residential real estate, there are many ways in which wealthy individuals may offer to help loved ones to achieve home ownership or favorable living arrangements. Each approach has tax implications, and determining the best approach will require consideration of a number of factors. This article by BDO explores some of the options that may be considered and identifies some of the tax implications that should be evaluated.