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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Estate Planning for Avoiding Probate, Or Not
With the estate tax eliminated for 2010 and changes on the back burner until fall, this is a good time to take a look at another key element of Estate Planning. One of your key estate planning issues is to what extent, if any, your estate should avoid Probate. This is very different from decisions […]
Roth IRAs for Estate Planning
There’s a lot of focus on Roth IRAs these days. Often overlooked is that for some people, however, a Roth IRA’s greatest benefit is as an Estate Planning tool. Before making a decision, consider carefully the potential estate planning effects of the Roth IRA and add those to any income tax benefits. While no estate […]
Why You Must Include Technology in Your Estate Planning
Technology needs to be part of your estate plan. I don’t mean the do-it-yourself tools available on the web to write a will or trust. I mean the technology you use regularly must be incorporated into your plan. The privacy policies and practices at most technology providers you deal with make it difficult for your […]
May 2010
May 26, 2010 10:00 a.m. Updating Our Portfolios The world’s markets finally lost the momentum that was pushing them upward for many months. Stock indexes are below many key levels (such as the 200-day moving average). Market internals (such as the number of stocks hitting new lows and the ratio of the number of stocks […]
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Knowing How Much of Your Estate to Give and When
The major issues in your estate plan are deciding who should receive your assets and how they should receive them (directly or through trusts, for example). Two other important issues that don’t receive as much attention are: How much wealth should you transfer sooner rather than later, and when should you give it? While these […]
Avoiding Traps in the Expired Estate Tax
The expiration of the estate tax is not good news for every-one. A new tax replaced the estate tax, and some estates, mostly modest estates, will pay more in the new tax than they would under the old estate tax. People who previously weren’t worried about estate taxes have to worry about the new tax. […]
March 2010
March 25, 2010 03:00 p.m. Housing, Health, and U.S. Debt We continue to learn more about that huge health care bill. The latest nugget is that there will be a new government-sponsored long-term care plan. I’m still unearthing the details. What I’ve seen so far is that the plan will be optional, but you have […]
Seizing the Family Loan Opportunity to Minimize Estate Taxes
The door soon will begin closing for the best opportunity ever to exploit a classic estate planning strategy. The strategy enables many families to transfer significant sums to the next generation while incurring few or no estate or gift taxes. Even estates that won’t be subject to estate taxes can use family loans to achieve […]
