Take-Away: A helpful reminder is that state law determines a property interest, while the federal law determines how to tax those property interests. Words used in the Tax Code may have a much different meaning when those same words are used in a trust’s discretionary distribution provision.   Background: Considerable time is spent looking that […]

Take-Away: The law of undue influence is subject to a variety of shifting evidentiary rules that can at times be confusing. Sometimes there is a presumption of undue influence, and other times there is no presumption. Where it becomes confusing is when an individual is identified as having a confidential or fiduciary relationship with the […]

Take-Away:  Each year Nevada attorney Steve Oshins ‘ranks’ various state statutes that deal with trusts and their administration. Steve recently came out with his latest ‘rankings’ of state statutes that authorize the trustee’s decanting of an irrevocable trust’s assets to a new trust created by the trustee. When compared to Delaware’s decanting statute, Michigan’s two […]

Take-Away: Michigan adopted the Uniform Trust Code’s (UTC) terminology of a qualified trust beneficiary although the UTC uses the slightly different term qualified beneficiary. The significance is that a qualified trust beneficiary is entitled to receive information with regard to a trust’s administration, such as annual trustee accountings. In addition, a qualified trust beneficiary also […]

A couple of months ago I wrote about the possible use of spousal lifetime access trusts (SLATs) as a way for a married couple to exploit the recent $5 million increase in their respective federal gift tax exemption amount, while still retaining access to the cash flow generated by those transferred assets. Yet another technique […]

Take-Away: What happens when an IRA owner fails to take his/her full required minimum distribution (RMD) for the year in which he/she dies? The general rule is that the named beneficiary takes and reports that last RMD in his/her income.  However, if the balance of the RMD is not taken prior to the close of […]

Take-Away: Earlier this month the U.S. Sixth Circuit found a Family Trust was the ‘business successor’ to a corporation that had an unfunded multi-employer pension obligation. The result was that $40+ million owed to the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation by the corporate sponsors that participated in the multiemployer pension plan was assessed against a Family […]

Take-Away:  Most of us are familiar with the use of the ascertainable standard , i.e. distributions limited to a beneficiary’s health, education, support or maintenance  (HEMS) used in trusts. As something of a surprise, the HEMS standard appears in three separate provisions of the Tax Code, two that deal with the taxation of the exercise […]

Take-Away: Under Michigan’s probate statutes, a spouse who is willfully absent from their deceased spouse for more than one year automatically forfeits his/her rights to take an intestate share or to serve in a fiduciary capacity over their spouse’s estate or affairs. For some reason our Courts have spent a lot of judicial energies diving […]

Take-Away: Apparently spouses are still adopting joint Wills in Michigan, much to my surprise. These documents often create considerable litigation after the death of the second spouse who thought that he/she could adopt a new Will. We have yet another decision from the Michigan Court of Appeals that obviously indicates that the surviving spouse did […]