Estate Administration
On November 11, 2023, the U.S. Treasury Department issued Rev. Proc. 2023-34 releasing the 2024 inflation-adjusted exemptions for estate, gift, and generation-skipping transfer tax as follows: The estate and gift exemption amount (currently $12.92 million in 2023) will increase to $13.61 million per taxpayer for 2024 ($27.22 million per married couple). The generation-skipping transfer tax…
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In my experience, there are only two or three things that truly create a hostile relationship and contention within a family during an estate administration process. What can lead to litigation in many instances is when one beneficiary feels they are entitled to more, or something different, than the other beneficiaries, even though the estate…
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Probate is the court-supervised process over which personal assets are transferred out of the individual’s name into the names of their heirs or beneficiaries after death. If the decedent died with no will and no other estate planning was done, his assets must go through probate. If he did proper planning and the assets were…
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It is a common assumption between spouses that at the death of the first spouse to die, the surviving spouse will inherit all the deceased’s property. This is usually not the case. If the individual or the deceased spouse has any children, whether from the first marriage or by the marriage to the surviving spouse,…
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We can demonstrate the importance of estate planning by comparing two estates with different approaches to estate planning. On one side of the continuum, we have an individual who has assets but no estate planning. On the other end of the continuum, we’ll have someone who has assets of the exact same nature, but they…
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