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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New Estate Exemption Amount Finalized for 2018
The exact amount of the estate and gift tax exemption for 2018 was in limbo until just recently. You know that the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act doubled the individual estate and gift tax exemption for 2018. Not everyone realized that the method for inflation indexing the amount also was changed in the law, and […]
Proving Your Residence: More Important after Estate Tax Reform
Some states will go to extraordinary lengths to keep from losing you as a legal resident. Unfortunately, that’s not a good thing. They aren’t going to heap inducements and incentives on you as they do to entice companies to stay. Instead, sometime after you think you’ve moved, they’ll argue that you or your estate still […]
The Tax-Free Lifetime Income Stream that Pays Up to 76% MORE than Social Security
To read the Special Report, please click the PDF below. […]
11 Essential Estate Planning Documents, Forms and Strategies
The most neglected assets in retirement and financial plans probably are the family home and home equity. Even though these are among the most valuable assets most people have, they are, at best, an afterthought in planning. Home equity should be an integral part of your retirement plan, and that makes it what I call […]
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Why A Power Of Attorney And Living Trust Are Critical
When you aren’t able to manage your finances any longer, or appear that way to others, two things could happen. One is that a successor takes over management of your assets under either your Power of Attorney or Living Trust. The person taking over would be someone you appointed and usually is a family member, […]
The Revocable Living Trust “Transition Strategy”
Last week, we reviewed the pros and cons of the Power of Attorney and Revocable Living Trust (click here for Part 1). For retirees who choose the revocable living trust, it’s important to understand all the options available. For starters, after identifying your trusted person, establish a revocable living trust naming the person as current […]
The Two Questions You Need to Ask
Investors were avoiding two key questions, but now they’re paying attention. It was easy to overlook these questions for more than a year, because we were in the sweet spot of the business and market cycles. Yet, that’s the time when it’s most important to probe these questions, and we’ve been doing that. Since mid-2016, […]
It’s Dangerous Not to Review Your Estate Plan after Tax Reform
Tax reform affects estate plans more than most people realize. In the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, the only direct change in estate and gift taxes was the doubling of the lifetime exemption amount. Though the IRS has yet to issue the official inflation-indexed levels for 2018, the individual lifetime exemption could be as high […]
