Take-Away: Despite some blunt court decisions from the past, some courts may not view a fiduciary as having an ongoing duty to ascertain a beneficiary’s eligibility status under a trust. At best, the law remains unsettled as to a trustee’s continuing duty to follow up to ascertain a beneficiary’s entitlement to receive distributions from a […]

Take-Away: A gift of closely held business interests to a child or grandchild is a key component of many estate plans. The problem arises if the donee of that gift, who works in the business, is later in a divorce.  A Michigan divorce judge can treat that gifted interest in the closely held business as […]

Take-Away: A couple of months ago a charitable remainder trust (CRUT) was suggested as a beneficiary of an IRA as an alternative to the loss of the ‘stretch’ IRA. Another option is to direct the decedent’s IRA to a charity in exchange for a testamentary charitable gift annuity (CGA) which may have more appeal to […]

Take-Away: The Michigan Probate and Estate Planning Council currently has formed a committee that is looking at the adoption of the Uniform Directed Trustee Act. Some changes to Michigan’s law will result if the Uniform Act is enacted ‘as is’ including: the trust protector-director will be treated as a fiduciary with an affirmative duty to […]

Take-Away: The IRS just published some rules, and it promises Regulations to follow, on taxpayers who used donor advised funds to satisfy charitable pledges. The Service is apparently concerned about a taxpayer who uses a donor advised fund distribution to satisfy the donor’s separate charitable pledge. Caution needs to be exercised if the charitable pledge […]

Take-Away: Normally when a person files for bankruptcy what is included in the debtor’s estate are assets owned by that person on the date that he/she filed for bankruptcy. That is frequently called the snapshot rule, i.e. a snapshot is taken of all assets owned by the debtor on that date and they are then […]

Take-Away: Delaware has a long history as ‘the place’ to situs a trust. Over the past several months many of those unique features of Delaware’s trust  law have been periodically summarized by me. Yet another fairly unknown feature of Delaware’s law came to my attention in my ‘late night reading,’ which adds to Delaware’s long-standing […]

Take-Away: As I promised yesterday, what follows is an example of how an IRA Beneficiary Designation should be written if the IRA is payable to the irrevocable Trust on the owner’s death and the goal is for each trust beneficiary to exploit the ‘stretch IRA’  concept where each trust beneficiary is free to use his […]

Take-Away: All too often individuals make mistakes when they divide their IRA accounts in a divorce. The some problems arise from confusing IRA and qualified retirement plan rules; another problem can be caused by jumping the gun. Background: These days a major asset accumulated during a marriage is an IRA. How that IRA gets divided […]

Take-Away: Frequently we are faced with an irrevocable trust that the settlor, or the trust beneficiaries, want to modify for some reason. Ignoring a trustees’ power to decant the trust assets to a new trust, can the trust’s provisions be modified by agreement? Michigan’s Trust Code permits an irrevocable trust to be modified, but ultimately […]