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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Most people, especially those with at least modest wealth, have engaged in some Estate Planning. Yet few people have complete plans. More likely than not, your estate plan is going to have gaps. There are plenty of anecdotes to support the statement, but there is also concrete evidence. I regularly see surveys of either estate […]
The number of people naming charitable trusts as IRA beneficiaries is climbing, and for good reasons. Typically, IRA beneficiaries are individuals, often the surviving spouse or the adult children of the owner. The goal often is to create a Stretch IRA, with the beneficiary taking only required minimum distributions (RMDs) each year so the tax-deferred […]
Investors soon will be reminded that index investing isn’t the same as passive investing. Standard & Poor’s and MSCI, the leading constructors of market indexes, will be overhauling their indexes. This isn’t the typical periodic change in which they move a few stocks in and out of the indexes. Instead, the firms are overhauling the […]
There has been quite a divergence between U.S. stock indexes and international indexes. Leading up to the correction in early 2016, U.S. stocks were far ahead of stocks from most other countries. After the correction, overseas stocks surged ahead of their U.S. counterparts. Latin American stocks were particularly strong. In the first part of 2017, […]
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You need to be sure the person who holds your financial Power of Attorney (POA) is aware of the recordkeeping and other requirements. POAs are relatively new, so the rules and standards have been evolving. POAs were first standardized in 1969 in the Uniform Probate Code published by the National Conference of Commissioners of Uniform […]
Many of the same mistakes seem to recur in one Estate Planning process after another, whether the estate is worth a billion dollars, a few hundred thousand dollars, or something in between. I’m going to skip the most common mistake of all: Your estate planning is not up to date. If you’re reading this article, […]
Three key factors are causing small company stocks to outperform larger company stocks in U.S. markets. Large company stocks led the way through the early stages of this bull market, but smaller company stocks surged ahead more recently. As proof, the S&P 500 gained 8.21% for the year to date, while the small company index […]
Earnings season for the second quarter is over, so you should be ready for stock prices to decline. I know that sounds counterintuitive, since the economy is strong, and growth might be increasing. This earnings season was a positive one with about two-thirds of companies reporting results exceeding estimates for earnings and revenue. Also, more […]
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