Beneficiaries Often Treat An Inheritance As A Windfall And Spend It As Such You spend your entire life working hard, accumulating wealth and you want to pass it onto your children, to provide for them and their families after you have passed. But will they appreciate your life’s earnings or…
Pets Are Often An Overlooked Concern in Estate Planning Despite their ubiquitous presence across the United States, few people consider the needs of their pets in their estate plan. People tend to be so concerned with providing for their children and making sure that their assets are protected from taxes…
A person planning their estate for the first time is confronted with a lot of uncomfortable questions that they most likely have never had to address. There are medical decisions to be made, executors and trustees to be chosen and appointed, burial instructions to spell out, and perhaps most importantly…
AN IMPORTANT AND SOMETIMES THANKLESS JOB There are times in life when we all will have to do or engage in a thankless job. One such time is when a close friend or a family member asks you to be the executor of their estate. The difference between an executor…
COMMON PROBLEM There is much talk lately of how to deal with email, facebook, twitter accounts, et cetera of people who pass away. For those of us who have friends or family who passed away and see their facebook account send a reminder to all of their friends on their…
ROBIN WILLIAMS UNIQUE ESTATE PLANNING GENIUS This blog discussed some of the aspects of Robin Williams estate in the past. Mr. Williams will be remembered for a long time due to his many accomplishments, with a long, funny, inciteful and compassionate comedic wit. While it seems fairly certain that Mr.…
As the new year opens it is a good time to review all of your legal estate planning decisions and tweak any previous documents that you think need to be modified. This requires us to get back to the basics of estate planning . For those scenarios that deal with…
PORTABILITY In 2011 Congress revamped the estate and gift tax laws and legislated that the federal estate and gift tax exclusion amount was $5 million. This amount is annually adjusted for inflation; the 2015 maximum is $5.43 million. Any estate values less than this amount are excluded from estate and…
A recent Forbes article reported that while most family business owners do have estate plans, many do not update their estate plans regularly. Many circumstances can change over just the course of a few years, which makes a regular review of any estate plan necessary in order to capture planning…