Take-Away: Fiduciaries who ‘stand in the shoes’ of a ward or decedent need to be able to access the ward/decedent’s email account to fully carry out their fiduciary duties and account for all of an individual’s assets and debts. While service providers have historically been reluctant, if not obstinate,  to permit access to email accounts […]

Take-Away: While an inheritance, or a gift, received by an heir is generally treated as a spouse’s separate property, there is no assurance that the separate property asset will be retained by the heir after their divorce. The best way to assure that an asset is treated as a spouse’s separate property is for both […]

Take-Away: Naming a trustee as the beneficiary of an IRA can be an effective way to exploit the required minimum distribution rules [RMDs] while protecting the IRA assets from the claims of the trust beneficiary’s creditors or to forestall an individual beneficiary’s temptation to take a lump sum distribution from an inherited IRA. But the […]

More details are indentified with today’s tax reform proposals. They include: the current personal exemption of $4,050 per taxpayer disappears. the real property tax deduction continues, but is limited to $10,000 per year. the state and local tax (SALT) deduction disappears; preserving the real property tax deduction was viewed as a compromise trade-off for the […]

A bit more clarity, and a bit of a surprise. The applicable federal exclusion amount would be raised to $10 million per taxpayer beginning 1/1/2018 [up from the current 5.49 million or the scheduled $5.6 million for 2018.] The federal estate tax would completely disappear on 1/1/2024. The federal GST tax would completely disappear on […]

Take-Away: If a client has fully utilized their applicable federal gift and estate tax exemption amount on lifetime gifts, they should consider the use of a net gift agreement if they want to continue to move appreciating assets out of their taxable estate through lifetime gifts. Better yet, they should consider using a net-net gift […]

While the tax reform proposal was released this morning, there are only a few details to share, which is consistent with prior ‘proposals’ that were publically floated earlier this year. Key points in the newest  tax reform proposal include the following: Repeal of the federal estate tax in 2024. Repeal of the Alternative Minimum Tax […]

Take-Away: The rules that deal with the distribution of an IRA to an irrevocable trust are already a challenge when identifying the oldest trust beneficiary of the see-through trust. It is even a bigger challenge when the trust beneficiary holds a limited power of appointment over the trust principal. Background: Identifiable Trust Beneficiaries: We all […]

Take-Away: In the past week I had three separate inquiries on whether the 2017 Tax Act creates a concern about ‘clawback’ that clients should be aware of when they start to make large lifetime gifts using their ‘new’ $5.0 million gift tax exemption, in light of the 2026 scheduled return to a much lower unified […]

Take-Away: The Annual Heckerling Estate Planning Institute is being held this week in Florida. I receive daily summaries of those estate planning presentations from a nationally known estate planning speaker and prolific writer, Martin M. Shenkman. In Mr. Shenkman’s summary of Tuesday’s Heckerling presentation with regard to the use of directed trustees, he provides a […]