Tip 1. Your estate is what you leave behind after you die. Everyone has an estate. Whether you are wealthy, old, young, a parent, single, or anything else, you have, or more specifically will have, an estate. Your estate is simply the collection of possessions, money, and other property you leave behind after you die,… Read more »
There are numerous different ways that you can arrange for assets to be transferred to your loved ones after you pass away. In truth, the best way to decide would be to discuss everything with an estate planning attorney. There is no reason to expect a layperson to understand all the options that are out… Read more »
When you are planning your estate, passing along resources directly with no strings attached can be perfectly acceptable for some established people on your inheritance list. At the same time, there could be people in the family who could use some guidance. Under these circumstances, you could consider the creation of an incentive trust. With… Read more »
As estate planning attorneys, we often encounter families who are suffering due to estate planning mistakes that were made by other family members. There is usually some type of damage control that can be done, but as they say, you don’t want to try to close the barn door after the horse has left. Let’s… Read more »
An individual retirement account can provide a valuable nest egg during your senior years. However, under certain circumstances, an IRA can also be useful from an estate planning perspective. Essentially, there are two different types of individual retirement accounts: traditional IRAs, and Roth individual retirement accounts. There are some similarities between them, but there are… Read more »
The question of taxation is naturally going to come to your mind when you are devising an estate planning strategy. Your heirs will be receiving windfalls of property, so you could assume that they would be forced to report the inheritances when they file their annual income tax returns. When it comes to the subject… Read more »
The federal estate tax was established back in 1916. What would you do if you knew that your estate was going to be subject to the estate tax? A logical person would consider lifetime gift giving, and this is exactly what wealthy people did after the estate tax was enacted. Tax minded legislators were not… Read more »
There are those who assume that a ready-made retirement is right there for everyone, because they know that they will qualify for Social Security and Medicare. To qualify for these programs, you have to accumulate at least 40 retirement credits while you are working and paying taxes. The requirement is quite modest, because in 2015,… Read more »
There are many challenges that you can face as a senior citizen. Unfortunately, loneliness is one of them. When you retire, you no longer have daily interactions with coworkers, and this is part of the equation. Plus, your children and grandchildren are going to have lives of their own, and they may even live out… Read more »
You may have heard that you do not have to be concerned about the federal estate tax because it is only applicable to extremely wealthy people. In reality, this may or may not be the case, depending on your definition of “extremely wealthy.” The line that is drawn between taxable inheritances and inheritances that are… Read more »