Articles Posted in Estate Planning

The loss of a parent is a heartbreaking experience, and discovering that your parent had a large amount of debt can add even more stress to the situation. Usually, creditors have a certain period of time in which to make claims against your parent’s estate. In most cases, you are not responsible for the debts of your deceased parent and if there are not enough assets the debt dies with them; however, in certain circumstances you can be on the hook to pay for what your parent left behind. Responsibility for debts is typically determined by the type of debt, the assets available, and where your parent resided.

Assets can be protected from creditors even if your parent passed on with debt. If you are listed as the beneficiary of a retirement account or life insurance policy that money cannot be touched by creditors. However, other assets in the estate may have to be sold in order to pay off the debts of creditors. This can greatly reduce or eliminate your inheritance from your parent’s estate.

Credit Card Debt

In a unanimous decision the Supreme Court has ruled that an IRA is not protected from creditors in bankruptcy proceedings when it is inherited in an estate. In the case of Clark v. Rameker, Heidi Heffron-Clark inherited an IRA from her mother in 2001. The account contained roughly $450,000 and she began to make distributions. In 2010, Mrs. Heffron-Clark and her husband filed for bankruptcy, but they claimed that the remaining $300,000 in the account was shielded from creditors as retirement funds. The creditors and bankruptcy court disagreed, and the case went all of the way up to the Supreme Court.

Key Distinctions of Inherited IRAs

The Court made its decision that inherited IRA accounts are subject to bankruptcy and creditors based on a couple of specific differences between inherited IRAs and owner IRA accounts. Owners of an inherited IRA cannot put additional funds into the account. Additionally, they can take distributions from the account at any time without penalty. In fact, the law states that an heir to an IRA account must either withdraw the entire amount from the account within five years of the original owner’s death or at the very least take out a minimum amount starting the December 31st after the original owner died. This applies to regular and Roth IRA accounts.

According to some estimates, the Baby Boomer generation will leave over $30 billion to their children in their wills over the next thirty to forty years. When leaving an inheritance for minor or adult children sometimes personal, professional, or financial issues can flare up and complicate the process. If you wish to leave your estate to your children here are five simple steps that will ease any conflicts in the planning.

· Use open communication to manage expectations

Talk to your children about what to expect from the estate. Recent surveys have found that children often undervalue their parents’ estates by over $100,000. Letting your children know where you stand financially and what they should reasonably expect resolves a lot of conflicts before they even begin. You should also communicate about how their expectations should change because of economic downturns, long-term medical care, or other unexpected issues.

The usual story regarding issues with prepaid funerals is similar to this – one person purchases a prepaid funeral plan and does not inform her family. Years later, she passes away and the documentation for the prepaid funeral plan is nowhere to be found nor does anyone know that it even exists. The family pays for the funeral, and only afterwards is the paperwork discovered. However, at that point the funeral has already occurred, and the home refuses to refund the family for the costs.

On the outset, prepaid funerals sound like a good idea to include in estate planning. It appears to be a way to reduce the stress and costs of planning a funeral on your family; however, many issues can arise with the incorporation of a prepaid funeral into an estate. Other options are available in estate planning that can solve the same problems without the potential pitfalls of a prepaid funeral.

Common Problems with Prepaid Funerals

Finding happiness with someone else at any age is a wonderful thing that we all strive for. However, combining family and finances later in life can be more complicated than getting married in your 20s or 30s. In addition to separate finances a lot of people who marry later in life already have their own estate plan in place. Combining two estate plans into one cohesive set of final wishes can be complicated. Here are a few tips to keep in mind when combining estate plans after a late-in-life marriage.

Talking About Prior Obligations

Older couples can bring prior obligations and debts into the estate planning process. While most financial matters affect the present, some obligations can have a direct effect on the estate planning process. If your new spouse has a reverse mortgage on the home or owes half of his pension to a former spouse it will have a direct impact on what will be inherited from the estate.

The importance of having a thorough and complete estate plan cannot be overstated. Not only does it protect your wishes, it also ensures that your loved ones are provided for after you are gone. However, the estate planning process is not a one-and-done deal. It is also important to update your estate planning documents to reflect any personal, familial, or financial changes that have occurred in your life. The estates of some famous actors illustrate why it is important to have an updated plan.

The actor Paul Walker, known mostly for his role in the high speed franchise, “The Fast and the Furious,” died tragically at the age of 40 in an automobile accident. At the time of his death, he was survived by his parents, his 15 year old daughter, and a girlfriend of seven years. Mr. Walker did have an estate plan in place with a pour-over will and trust set up for his daughter. Unfortunately, Mr. Walker set up his estate plan twelve years prior – the same year that his first hit franchise movie came out. Since then, his wealth had increased dramatically and he entered into a long-term relationship. Because his plans were never updated his daughter will be inheriting millions more than anticipated, his long-term girlfriend will get nothing, and the family does not have the direction to know what his true last wishes would have been.

Philip Seymour Hoffman provides another good example of why it is important to update your estate planning documents. Mr. Hoffman died at age 46 from a drug overdose earlier this year. At the time of his death he was survived by his companion of fourteen years and mother of his children as well as his three kids ages 10, 7, and 5. At the time of his death, Mr. Hoffman had an estate plan that was created in 2004. It provided for the eldest child who was the only one born at the time, and did not have any language that provided for the case of future children. His two pretermitted children, those born after the creation of the will, are now left in a precarious legal situation. In addition, since the creation of his estate plan Mr. Hoffman had gained significant wealth and acclaim from winning an Oscar and his successful movie career. He never updated his will to manage this new wealth, and as a result of the language of his will all of the assets that go to his longtime companion will be taxed once under his estate and again under her estate when she dies before it goes to their children.

According to 2010 U.S. Census data, 56.7 million Americans, or almost 20 percent of U.S. residents, have a disability. Within this demographic, over 5 million adults need assistance with self-care and independent living activities, including difficulty getting around inside the home, getting into/out of bed, bathing, dressing, eating, toileting, managing money, preparing meals, doing housework, taking prescription medications, and using the phone.

More than half of those with severe disabilities who are age 15 to 64 receive some form of public assistance. Approximately 33 percent receive Social Security benefits and approximately 20 percent receive Supplemental Security Income (SSI) benefits. Some also receive other forms of cash assistance such as Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) (formerly called food stamps), and public or subsidized housing.

Given the above statistics, many people who are making estate plans will be leaving money or property to someone with a disability who has a special needs situation. However, if the inheritance is not structured properly, the receipt of money or property can negatively impact a person with disabilities’ eligibility for some public assistance programs.

In the Information Age our digital presence and assets are just as important as our physical estate. Digital assets consist of all of our property that exists online. This can include brokerage accounts, bank accounts, PayPal, and online currency such as bitcoin. However, our digital presence extends far beyond that into other areas such as social media accounts, email addresses, online subscriptions, documents, photographs, and digital music libraries. Over 75% of all Americans have some kind of social media account or have an account on a social networking website. When creating an estate plan you need to consider what your wishes are for your digital assets as well as how you would like them to be handled.

The first step in creating a comprehensive digital estate plan is to identify and organize all of your digital assets. A simple way to track these assets is to create an Excel spreadsheet. You can break your digital property into categories in addition to having all pertinent user names, passwords, and other information necessary for access. Excel sheets can be password protected, so for those who are worried about other people gaining access to their online accounts a level of security can be added. Other people keep track of accounts and information in a small notebook or other non-digital means.

The next step is deciding who should be the “trustee” of these accounts. This is the person who would manage all of your wishes for your digital property. This person would distribute assets, delete or erase accounts, or continue to manage any digital accounts that you have. Typically, a family member or friend is named as trustee, but the digital assets could be broken into separate groups with a different trustee for each. The best person, or people, to choose are those who will handle the assets according to your wishes.

For those who are single or childless, estate planning options are vast and often complicated. It is estimated that over 17 million people who are retirement age are unmarried or childless facing this very dilemma. However, a new wave of estate planners are now facing the same issues of those retirees – the young, wealthy, and childless.

Since the tech boom in the 1990s, a considerable number of young entrepreneurs are becoming millionaires and billionaires. Due to their financial circumstances, these people are considering financial and estate planning at a much younger age. The vast majority of this younger generation is childless, some are unmarried, and all are considering what will happen to their wealth when they are gone. Because of this shift in wealth, estate planning attorneys are now stressing income, instead of age, as a more reliable metric for when you should be drafting a plan for your estate.

The most important thing to this new generation of estate planners is flexibility. When planning for the future at this age, there is a higher chance of changing circumstances both personally and financially. The probability of starting a family or having swings in finances is much greater in a person’s 20s and 30s than at the typical retirement age. Estate planning attorneys are now coming up with new and flexible options for this generation of young, wealthy, and childless clients.

Estate planning is meant to provide direction and security for loved ones when we pass away, but complications can arise in the estate planning process when structuring a plan as a married couple. Each person in the marriage has individual estate planning goals, tax-related objectives, and ideas for the future. However, upon probing deeper through the individual wants and needs of the spouses common goals run through the estate planning process of almost all married couples:

· Providing for family and loved ones

This is typically the top priority for all married couples. They want to know that their surviving spouse, children, grandchildren, extended family and friends are all provided for after they are gone. Even pets can be provided for if an estate plan is structured correctly.