On July 6 it released a "revenue ruling" that clears up long standing gift and estate tax issues relating to an estate-planning tool--irrevocable grantor trusts--widely used by wealthy families.
There are get-rich-quick books, estate-planning books, trend books and the beat-the-market tomes.
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As attention shifts beyond immediate needs, one of the next steps for surviving spouses should be updating their own estate-planning documents, including their will, power of attorney and health-care proxy.
In between all the plotting and back-stabbing, the characters blunder into a broad array of financial- and estate-planning disasters, from bad investments and messy trusts to poor business-succession plans and power struggles following health crises.
For estate-planning reasons, neither my wife nor I could be the initial tai-pan, so we chose our trusted financial advisor, Dave.
While clients in the West want to increase their wealth, they also are concerned with keeping what they have by sticking to conservative investments, and focusing on estate- and tax-planning strategies.
Along the way, you reduce your current tax bill and give yourself a powerful estate-planning instrument.
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Well, it looks like the best time for this tax-saving estate-planning strategy is in October.
During last year's estate-planning bonanza, demand spiked for quiet trusts in particular, experts say.
"The whole plot is really about an enormous estate-planning problem, " says Kenneth Brier, a lawyer in Needham, Mass.
"The idea wasn't completely unilateral, " said Mr. Gilbert, a senior partner at Gilbert-Krupkin LLC, an insurance and estate-planning firm.
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It started out as a C-Corporation, but she changed it to an LLC about 15 years ago for estate-planning reasons.
Because of life insurance's special status under tax law, permanent policies are sometimes used by wealthy individuals as an estate-planning tool.
That helped drive the acquisition of U.S.Trust and its trust and estate-planning expertise, which thrusts Schwab into the rather different market of wealth management.
Mr. de Guigne is selling for estate-planning purposes, Mr. Hampton adds.
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"Defective grantor trusts, " another estate-planning technique, don't have new limits, either.
The answer depends on the size of the gift, how much asset appreciation there is, and the donor's overall investment, estate-planning and giving goals, Mr. Teitell says.
For most, it means revisiting their own estate-planning documents.
The answers may determine which estate-planning techniques make the most sense for a family to use, says Patrick Ungashick, president of White Horse Advisors, an Atlanta financial-advisory firm that specializes in small businesses.
Gordon Schaller, an estate-planning lawyer in Irvine, Calif.
Donors could also put the partnership shares in a charitable remainder trust, a popular estate-planning device in which donors or their beneficiaries draw income for life, with trust assets going after death to a charity.
Beyond that, when the time comes, he or she can counsel you on ways to draw down funds from your accounts when needed and help with estate-planning and tax issues or recommend a pro to handle that for you.
The possible move, which has been floated previously, "makes more sense than a cap, because it's making the point that retirement accounts were never meant as an estate-planning vehicle and it would accomplish basically the same thing, " Mr. Slott, the IRA consultant, says.
For a plain-English explanation of how GRATs and other estate planning opportunities work, see Estate Planning Smarts: A Practical, User-Friendly Action-Oriented Guide, the bestselling book by Deborah L. Jacobs .
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Our New York City, White Plains or Fishkill Special Needs attorneys and Estate Planning attorneys can assist with long-term care, asset preservation, and estate matters.
Deborah L. Jacobs, a lawyer and award-winning journalist, is the author of the bestselling book, Estate Planning Smarts: A Practical, User-Friendly, Action-Oriented Guide, 2nd Edition (DJWorking Unlimited, 2011).
In addition, wealthier individuals lose the ability to do estate-tax avoidance planning.
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