Estate Planning
Within wills or trust documents, a power of appointment grants an individual, known as the power holder or donee, the authority to designate another person, the appointee, as the recipient of all or a portion of assets. Powers of appointment can serve as powerful estate planning tools, offering significant tax planning opportunities. While we cannot…
Read MoreEstate planning encompasses a wide variety of subject matter, from how your assets may be titled and who is the beneficiary of your insurance to IRAs and 401(k)s, to the creation of business entities, the establishment of buy-sell agreements, the creation of trusts and gifting during your lifetime. The process allows you, rather than a…
Read MoreIn my experience, it is often much more important to plan in anticipation of incapacity during your lifetime. For example, what would happen if one spouse becomes incapacitated, needing to go into a nursing home and the other spouse needs to sell the primary residence during that time? Without a plan in place, such as…
Read MoreIn Rev. Proc 2022-38, the IRS provided inflation adjustments for various IRS Code provisions for taxable year 2023, including many relevant to trusts, estates, and gifts. The 2023 inflation adjustments include: The basic estate and gift tax exclusion amount (and the generation skipping transfer tax amount) will increase to $12,920,000 from the 2002 exemption of…
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Towards the end of the year, some families consider making financial gifts to others as part of their year-end tax planning. As part of your estate plan, you may consider sharing your financial success with your children, grandchildren, or other loved ones before your death. First, let’s review gifts that aren’t taxable. Gifts that are…
Read MoreA trust is essentially a contract between two people, one who is the grantor of the trust and the other the trustee or beneficiary. These can be the same individual, the grantor of the trust can also be the trustee. That’s contrary to contract law where generally you cannot enter into a contract with yourself,…
Read MoreIt 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,…
Read MoreWe 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…
Read More[vc_row el_class=”container”][vc_column][vc_column_text]In a perfect world, you should review your estate planning documents every time there is a life event, such as a, Birth, Death, Marriage, Divorce, or Retirement. You also want to review them with the acquisition or sale of a significant asset, like that of a business. These are times to pull out your…
Read More[vc_row el_class=”container”][vc_column][vc_column_text]Determining what the objectives are, implementing a plan that meets those objectives in a way that conforms to the laws of the tax code and treasury regulations is important when planning any estate. To accomplish this, our approach is to sit down to listen to the client. The first question we ask is, “Tell…
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