Estate Planning
Estate Planning is the process of determining how your wealth and assets should be transferred to the heirs of your choice: your children, grandchildren, friends, families, charitable causes, etc. and then deciding which legal tools and structures to use to best meet your estate planning goals.
Estate planning is not simply reducing or eliminating taxes and avoiding probate. Only after establishing how you want your estate’s assets to be distributed should you consider ways to reduce taxes and avoid probate. From there, good estate plans deal with a host of other issues. Now, with all but a few estates exempt from the federal estate tax, those other issues are, or should be, at the forefront of estate planning.
An estate plan is to ensure that you are taken care of the rest of your life and that your wealth is transferred to the people you want to have it. A good estate plan ensures these goals are accomplished with as much efficiency and as little cost as possible. An estate plan addresses the management and distribution of an individual’s property and financial obligations after he or she dies with financial tools such as wills, revocable living trusts and power of attorney.
For a comprehensive overview of Estate Planning, please start with our article:
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The Scope of Retirement Success
Some years ago, I was a speaker at a conference in the Cayman Islands. Most of the speakers dressed casually and enjoyed the local attractions when we weren’t making presentations. One afternoon, I ran into one of the other speakers in the hotel lobby. He was dressed in a suit and tie. While wiping away […]
Can You Spend More in Retirement Than You’ve Been Told?
Longtime readers know I believe the spending plan is the biggest gap in most retirement plans. The spending plan ensures you won’t run out of money in retirement. It answers the question: What’s the maximum amount I can spend each year and not risk running out of money? The longtime consensus among financial planners is […]
This is the Best Time of the Year for Giving
The start of the year is the best time forestate plan-motivated gifts. Even if you made gifts late in 2018, consider making your 2019 gifts soon. Estate tax reduction used to be the major incentive for annual giving to family members. Now, only the very wealthy need to make gifts to reduce estate and gift […]
Bob’s Journal (12/13/2018)
It is important for investors to ignore the whipsaw actions of the markets during the last few months, because they’ve been caused by short-term news and events. Presidential tweets and rumors about policy changes cause most of the daily fluctuations in the markets. Most of the focus has been on trade conflicts with China, causing […]
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Can You Afford these Estate Planning Mistakes?
In Part 1 of this article, we reviewed some classic Estate Planning mistakes that are fairly common among retirees. Today, let’s continue the discussion with four more oversights, so you can evaluate your own estate planning process. Leaving assets outright to adult children. Many people believe trusts are needed only when minor children inherit. […]
7 Estate Planning Mistakes That Could Be Costing You
If you’ve never seen an Estate Planning professional… Or if your estate planning hasn’t been revised within the last three years… Then your plan is likely to have at least one of these classic mistakes. Today let’s go through these estate planning mistakes, one by one… 1. Relying only on a will. A written […]
Happy Thanksgiving 2018
Happy Thanksgiving to all my subscribers and readers. I’m thankful for the opportunity to help each of you establish and maintain your financial independence. Most people believe the first Thanksgiving took place in Plymouth, Massachusetts. I don’t want to upset any of my readers and friends in the Bay State, but the first Thanksgiving in […]
The Resurgence of The Wind-up Watch
I recently saw an item in a Forbes magazine about vintage watches. The article said that in this age of digital technology, collectors and investors suddenly are more interested in old wind-up, analog watches. This warmed my heart. I still have and wind daily the pocket watch my parents gave me for my 21st birthday. […]
