JEFFREY F. BAHLS, JD, CFP

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Mr. Bahls graduated from Bucknell University in 1964 with a degree in chemistry, worked for General Electric in finance, served in the United States Army as a Signal Officer in Vietnam, and received his law degree from Temple University School of Law in 1970. He has historically done residential, commercial, and industrial real estate work and major transaction work (organized for-profit and not-for-profit entities, contracts, leases, agreements of sale, financing documents, etc.).

Since 1995, almost his entire professional focus has been estate planning, charitable gift planning, estate and trust administration, financial planning, legal work for a non-profit health care organization, and consultant work for a large educational institution for disabled children. In September 2004 he made a partial life style change by moving to Park City, Utah, where he continues to provide services to his Pennsylvania based clients while working with new clients in Utah.
Professional Organizations
He is a member of the Utah Bar and the US District Court for the District of Utah, the Bucks County Bar, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court Bar, and U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania Bar. He has been an active member of the Bucks County and Pennsylvania Bar Associations and the Bankruptcy Conference for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania (the bankruptcy bar association for the US District Court for the Eastern District of PA). With respect to the Bucks County Bar Association (600+ members), he has served on numerous committees, and held numerous offices before his election as President in 1987 - 1988. He has been active with the Pennsylvania Bar Association, serving as a Zone Delegate from Bucks County for fifteen years, and in the process became one of the founding members of the Pennsylvania Bar Foundation. He also served a term as a director of the Eastern District of Pennsylvania Bankruptcy Conference.
Legal Experience
In the early 1980's, he served as Secretary and General Counsel to AM Communications, Inc. whose business was the construction of cable TV systems across the United States and the manufacture of electronic equipment for the cable TV industry. In the course of his representation the company went from a private to a public company by virtue of two public offerings (1980 & 1983) that raised a combined $10 million of total equity investment. It also became qualified as a 1934 Securities Act company thereby imposing various annual and quarterly financial filing requirements. The significance being that out of that experience he became knowledgeable about the problems, burdens and responsibilities of small companies going through the public capital raising process and then maintaining their achieved status.
He also served for five years as a solicitor to Quakertown Borough (1980-1985). The Borough of 12,000 people (i) ran its own electric distribution facilities, water plant, and sewer plant; (ii) was free of any debt; and (iii) had investments well in excess of $12.0 M. (1983 dollars). For the Borough he initiated the founding and operation of the Quakertown Area Industrial and Commercial Development Authority to promote local the development of industry and commerce in the community.
In the context of charitable/ non-profit organizations, for fifteen years he served as general counsel to LifeQuest, a non-profit provider of health care services that formerly owned an 89 bed hospital and was a consultant to Melmark, Inc., a multi-state non-profit provider of educational services to a large population of disabled individuals. In the field of commercial law, he served from 1989 to 1994 as commercial law counsel to a Quakertown National Bank.
Current Legal Professional Status
Mr. Bahls is authorized to practice law in Utah as well as in Pennsylvania. This authority to practice law carries with it certain ethical responsibilities, constrains and conflicts with other responsibilities of his other profession of a financial planner. As a consequence both professions may not always be carried out in the same locus. Hence Mr. Bahls performs his financial planning work from his home offices in Glenmoore, PA and Park City, UT. He is of Counsel with the Park City law firm of Wrona Law Firm, 1745 Sidewinder Drive, Park City, UT 84060, ph: 435-649-2525.
Professional Organizations (Estate and Financial Planning)
In the field of estate and financial planning, his primary area of concentration for the last fourteen years, Mr. Bahls successfully challenged the CFP comprehensive examination and received the CFP designation from the Certified Financial Planner Board of Standards in April 1995. He is a past president of the Financial Planning Association of the Philadelphia-Tri-State Area; this local chapter of a national organization has 900+ members, both CFP and non-CFP, who are dedicated to furthering the financial planning process and profession. He was a member of the Presidential Advisory Board of Melmark, Inc., one of the largest educational institutions for disabled children in Pennsylvania (resident population of 400+/-) with an 80 acre campus in suburban Philadelphia and another campus in Massachusetts. In Utah he is a member of the Financial Planning Association of Utah, having served as a director and chairman of its symposium committee.
Estate Planning Work
The major focus of his estate planning work is using various trust based techniques to facilitate (I) asset preservation/protection, (ii) consistent, competent and cost effective management, (iii) long term investment goals and objectives, (iv) management of beneficiary distributions, (v) beneficiary access to capital for proper purposes, (vi) personal values based distribution plans, and the enhancement of capital through tax avoidance. His typical clients are married couples with assets, including life insurance death proceeds, between $1.0M and $10.0M although a couple of his wealthiest clients have assets of $20.M or more. Mr. Bahls considers himself to be specially skilled in the design and funding of Advisors Trusts, Irrevocable Life Insurance Trusts (ILITs), IRA Trusts, and of Charitable Remainder Trusts (ACRTs@). He has created over twenty-five CRTs to date in coordination with several eastern based financial planners.
Green Tree Planning
In 1998 Mr. Bahls founded Green Tree Planning in order to place the clients focus on the creation of their estate and financial plans rather than on the legal work spawned by the plans. The point being that clients were tending to focus on the various devices used to implement their plans instead of on plan creation. Since a great deal of his work impacts upon client investment and financial plans, he became qualified as a licensed Investment Advisor (Series 66) in the states of Pennsylvania and Utah. It is an active part of his business to the extent of assisting clients in the selection of corporate trustees and the money managers for their trusts.
The estate planning fees are usually fixed and based upon specific levels of service. The legal fees parallel the same levels of service and include a warranty to assure that the documentary side of the client=s estate plan will remain viable and in conformance of law for at least a year following completion of the work. He also offers a periodic review program to maintain the continued effectiveness of the estate plan. Upon request, materials describing the various levels of service, the benefits of those services, and the fees for them will be provided. The materials also describes the Warranty and the Periodic Review Program.
CLIENT REFERENCES
Due to professional ethical constraints, disclosure of the identity of individual clients is prohibited without the consent of the client. It is Mr. Bahls= policy to assure complete confidentiality by neither disclosing nor requesting the authority to disclose such information. Despite this inability to disclose specific clients, he can disclose that he does provide estate planning services to clients located in states other than Pennsylvania and U.S. citizens residing outside the United States. He has developed estate plans for families living in Delaware, Florida, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, Washington (state), Utah and Europe. To do this effectively the assistance of local counsel is secured when and where needed.
REFERENCES
Personal and professional references will be supplied upon request.