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Found 54 Articles.
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Great Estate Planning Strategies for Year-End Giving
You don’t need cash to put a sizeable tax deduction on this year’s tax return. If you have some appreciated assets, you have a way to keep the taxman at bay. The best assets to use are your first or second home and securities, such as stocks or mutual funds. Pick the proper strategy 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 […]
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 […]
The Modern Way To Give: The Total Return Trust
Too many trusts these days are set up the old-fashioned way. I see them all the time. The result is that all the beneficiaries of the trust are short-changed, and they often end up angry at each other, the trustee, and the grantor. A once-generous endowment eventually becomes a legacy of discontent. Suppose you want […]
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 Protect Your Most Valuable Asset
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]