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 Adjust Your Estate Planning to Make the Most of the New IRA Rules
Note: These regulations were updated ago about a year after this article. Please see the article in the June 2002 Grandkid’s Watch for an update on the final regulations. Click here. An important decision faces many of you. Make it carefully and the odds are greatly reduced that between estate taxes and income taxes the […]
The Result of Market Change on Your Estate Plan
A new tax law isn’t the only reason to revisit your estate plan. Investment market changes and falling interest rates change the effects of many estate plans, often without their creators knowing the consequences. Here’s a guide to some the effects the changes of the last 18 months might have on your estate plan. The […]
The Best Strategies for Financing College
Forget all you’ve learned about helping to pay for college. The rules for most people aren’t what you’ve heard. College is so expensive, especially at private schools, that most students get some form of financial aid. Some of the schools boast about the percentage of students who get aid. Even loans are financial aid, and […]
Is A Living Trust For You?
Visit any area with a lot of older Americans, and you’ll see plenty of ads for free seminars on Living Trusts by lawyers and financial profes-sionals. Recently, the seminars even sprouted up in my area and seem to be spreading. There aren’t too many lawyers who will go to the trouble of presenting a free […]
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How to Preserve the Family Business
When owners think about preserving the family business for the next generation, they think about estate taxes. You can do a lot to continue the family firm through tax strategies such as annual gifts, family limited partnerships, dynasty trusts, and the like. But tax planning is at most only half the job. Half of all […]
Handling The Toughest Estate Problem: The Family Home
The most difficult part of an estate plan can be the family home or a second home. Often the property is a large part of the estate’s value. It also cannot be divided among the heirs. They either sell the property or share it. But the emotions surrounding a family property probably are the biggest […]
Strategies to Protect Your Estate Plan
What’s the biggest problem with most estate plans? Often it is not taxes or cash flow. Many times the biggest problem is the trustee or executor that was appointed to carry out the estate plan. Trusts usually are a key part of the estate plan. How the trustee administers the trust determines the quality of […]
How to Teach Grandkids Wealth Management
It is nice to give wealth to grandchildren. But an even better gift can be to teach them how to multiply and manage their wealth the rest of their lives. Youngsters today are more financially savvy than any prior generation. They own investments, have such high discretionary income that retailers pitch to youngsters, and even […]
