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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How to Protect Your IRA
Would you spend a minute or less deciding the fate of your most valuable asset? Do you want a mutual fund or other financial institution to make the decision? Most people actually spend less than a minute designating the beneficiaries for their IRAs or other qualified retirement plans. And they give little or no thought […]
Trusts You Should Avoid
Trusts are hot, and the IRS has declared war on them. It has increased staff and is planning more audits of trusts. But most Retirement Watch readers can relax. Trusts put together by the scam artists are those the IRS is going after. These are trusts that purport to eliminate taxes without changing your use […]
How to Leave More for Grandkids
Would you like your grandchildren to end up with only 20% of what you intended? That’s what happens in most cases. The government doesn’t want you to pass wealth directly to your grandchildren. It wants the money to stay in your estate, get it hit by estate taxes, go to your children, get it hit […]
How to Beat Little-Known Estate Plan Traps
It’s the little things that often sabotage an estate plan. You can work with your estate planner to get the right gifting program, trusts, and other strategies. But a mundane detail or two still could undo a lot of your work. Whether the estate is a few hundred thousand dollars or millions of dollars, it […]
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Big Benefits from an Overlooked Charitable Trust
Let’s take a strategy we developed last month, build on it, and turn it into something very powerful. In the “defective” grantor trust we discussed last month the grantor of the trust is taxed on all its income, but the trust is excluded from the grantor’s estate. The combination lets you leave more tax-free dollars […]
A “Defective” Trust That Saves You Money
Sometimes when Congress closes one tax loophole it creates another. This is especially likely when Congress doesn’t coordinate the income and estate tax sections of the law. That’s how complicated the tax law is. And it opens up an opportunity for you with “grantor trusts.” A grantor trust in the income tax law is one […]
Effective Estate Planning Strategies
Almost no estate plan is a lost cause. An estate can be improved when it appears to be too late. In fact, heirs and beneficiaries can make some smart moves to reduce taxes even after the loved one has passed away. Whenever you are dealing with someone else’s estate, you should be aware that a […]
New Rules Help IRAs Last For Decades
New rulings from the IRS make it easier to preserve your IRA for a generation or more. Your children and grandchildren can use tax deferral even longer, and IRAs can be customized for each heir. But you have to take action to benefit from these rulings, and you should leave instructions for your heirs. Otherwise, […]
