Missives

Take-Away: The legal effect of a divorce between spouses is to treat the former spouse as having predeceased the decedent for purposes of interpreting a Will, Trust or any other governing instrument in Michigan. But that, apparently, is not the law in other states. Consequently, it is dangerous to assume that how Michigan treats a […]

Take-Away:  A trustee is required to take reasonable steps to locate trust property and to compel a former trustee to deliver trust property to the acting trustee. Much less clear under the Michigan Trust Code is the delivery of prior communications between the former trustee and the trust beneficiaries and between the former trustee and […]

Take-Away: The Probate and Estate Planning Council of the State Bar of Michigan is currently studying a proposed recommendation for an ante-mortem statute that would be used to validate the terms of a Will while the testator is still alive. The Council took a serious look as such a proposed statute back in 2015, but […]

Take-Away: There are varying degrees of mental capacity for various actions or documents signed by individuals. Often those different ‘tests’ of mental capacity appear in the same legal document which might raise questions as to the validity of actions taken by third parties under those documents. Background: The capacity of an individual differs depending upon […]

Take-Away: While an IRA can be divided by spouses in a divorce without income tax consequences to the owner of the IRA, apparently there can be a loss of creditor protection to the former spouse who receives the IRA incident to a divorce. Background: The division of traditional IRAs and qualified retirement accounts is common […]

Take-Away: While there are many good tax and philanthropic reasons for clients over the age of 70 ½ to make charitable gifts using their traditional IRAs,  a couple of unanswered questions linger with regard to the implementation of that  qualified charitable distribution strategy. Background on Qualified Charitable Distributions: You know from prior ‘missives’ that a […]

Take-Away: Several state income tax statutes are now being successfully attacked in courts across the nation on the grounds that the imposition of the state income tax is a violation of the Constitution’s Due Process Clause. As such, there exists the need to spend a bit more time selecting the administrative situs of an irrevocable […]

Take-Away: Despite the dramatic increase in the federal estate tax exemption amount it is probably premature to advise an individual to terminate an irrevocable life insurance trust (ILIT) as no longer necessary Tax laws continue to change and a trust provides far greater protection against judgment creditor claims that a trust beneficiary may face. Background: […]

Take-Away: When an IRA or retirement account is made payable to an irrevocable trust, the goal is to assure that the trust satisfies the IRS’ see-through rules so that the oldest individual trust beneficiary’s life expectancy can be used to determine the taxable required minimum distributions that the trustee must take from the retirement account. […]

Take-Away: It comes as no surprise that much of our client’s wealth these days is now tied up in IRAs (traditional, Roth, SEP and SIMPLE) as well as in 401(k) accounts. Control of these retirement assets, by default, passes to a conservator, or agent acting under a durable power of attorney, if the retirement asset […]