Articles Posted in Estate Planning

By the time that the legendary screen actor and comedian Groucho Marx became a senior citizen, he had a difficult time making a number of decisions regarding his daily life. 

During this time, Marx’s companion, Erin Fleming, was accused of elder abuse and experienced a deterioration in his relationship with Marx’s children. This was made complex by Fleming’s decision to push Marx to perform. Later, after Marx became incapacitated, Fleming was appointed as guardian and temporary conservator of Marx’s valuable estate. Marx’s grandson was later named permanent conservator. 

Following Marx’s death, the fight for assets from the late legend’s estate continued on for years. A judge later resolved the debate in favor of Groucho’s children and ordered Fleming to repay a large amount that she had stolen from Marx’s bank accounts. 

Statistics show there are an increasing number of older individuals who are divorcing later on in life. There is also an increasing number of individuals who are discovering that living together as an unmarried couple has its advantages. 

According to the United States Census Bureau, the number of unmarried individuals who are older than 50 even increased by 75% between 2007 and 2016. 

Unfortunately, however, living together as an unmarried couple creates a number of unique estate planning challenges. This article reviews some of these hurdles.

Creating a successful inheritance trust is not easy. In some situations even when a family believes that they have created a well-written inheritance trust, they have failed to address a number of complexities including those involving incompetency. This article reviews some of the elements that should be included in an inheritance trust. 

# 1 – Appropriate Beneficiary Designations

Appropriate beneficiary designations are a vital part of trusts. Inheritance trusts are created so assets can be passed to a designated beneficiary during that individual’s life and following the individual’s death to any of the person’s children. Additionally, good inheritance trusts are written with the understanding that a situation might arise where a beneficiary is temporarily not able to serve as a trustee.

The introduction of cryptocurrency has created a number of new issues, which includes how these digital assets should be addressed in a person’s estate plan. Because the Internal Revenue Service has classified cryptocurrency as property capable of being taxes, it is possible to dictate how ownership of cryptocurrency should be passed in a person’s estate plan. In many cases, however, it can prove difficult to transfer ownership of cryptocurrency without creating a potential security risk. 

The Estate Planning Challenges Presented by Cryptocurrency

A person’s ownership of cryptocurrency is represented in that individual’s virtual “wallet”, which also stores the owners’ credentials and interacts with blockchains so users can both send and receive cryptocurrency. Consequently, the person who knows the access credentials to a virtual wallet has access to any cryptocurrency that is contained in the wallet. 

The Vermont Supreme Court recently heard the case of In re Peter Val Preda Trusts, which introduced some important estate planning issues that all individuals interested in creating trusts should understand. 

Both the individual who created the trust as well as his wife were deceased. In June 2018, the petitioners requested the Georgia probate division to remove the respondent as the individual family trustee of the trustee and appoint the petitioner’s wife as the respondent’s successor. 

The basis for removing the trustee was that the petitioner claimed the removal would improve how the trust was administered because the petitioner and respondent did not communicate with one another and that the respondent had failed to pay attention to investments of the trust. 

The retirement process is full of challenges. One of the best ways to make sure that you navigate this process successfully is to anticipate the various obstacles that lie ahead of you. The implementation of strategies to avoid or limit the severity of obstacles that do arise should be included in a retirement plan. 

The purpose of this article is to review some of the most common mistakes that you should anticipate as you consider and begin the creation of a retirement plan. 

# 1 – Failure to Create a Strategy at All