One of the most tax-beneficial estate planning changes in recent history was the ability to transfer an unused estate tax exemption from a deceased spouse to his or her surviving spouse. Introduced by the Obama administration in 2011, this capability, known as portability, significantly changed the way trusts are written to shelter estates from estate…
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IRAs are among the simplest and best ways to transfer wealth to heirs. In effect, you are not simply passing on a chunk of money, but rather a chunk of money with future tax-deferred or tax-free growth embedded. However, if you are the beneficiary of an IRA, it’s important that you take the right steps…
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If you’re a high net worth individual or family, chances are your estate planning strategy has focused on finding ways to exclude assets from your estate in order to minimize estate transfer taxes after you pass away. Gifting low-basis property while alive together with the use of bypass trusts after death are common ways to…
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For some, the end-of-year holidays engender thoughts of helping those less fortunate. For others, it’s a time to develop strategies to save on taxes. Charitable giving allows you to achieve both goals. However, what if you would like to help but don’t yet know to which charities you would like to contribute? One of the…
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Now that the Powerball lottery has arrived in California, I thought it would be good to talk about the impact of unexpected or sudden wealth on one’s life. We’ve all probably dreamed at one time or another about how fantastic our lives would become if we could only win the lottery. I’ve no doubt there…
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We frequently get this question from many of our clients, so we thought we’d spend a little time explaining why you need to be careful when naming a trust as the beneficiary of an IRA or Roth. The primary reason is that a beneficiary normally gets to “stretch” the distributions from an inherited IRA or…
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Cognitive impairment in old age may not simply be the result of a random event such as Alzheimer’s or a stroke. There is increasing evidence that cognitive decline in old age is natural and inevitable, and cannot be slowed by education or intelligence, nor by so-called brain exercises such as solving crossword puzzles. Our brain,…
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