Take-Away: While Michigan  recognizes the validity and use of a postnuptial agreement, if history is much of any indication, they are frequently viewed as against Michigan’s public policy and thus they are not enforceable by courts in a future divorce. Thus, conditioning a trust distribution on the beneficiary entering into a postnuptial agreement may prove […]

Take-Away: Recently the South Dakota Supreme Court held that an order of a California state court that required the direct payment by the trustee for the beneficiary’s child support obligation was an enforcement mechanism and thus not entitled to the protection of the Full Faith and Credit Clause of the U.S. Constitution. This is just […]

Take Away: A recent federal District Court decision reminds us that if the donor of a gift fails to pay the federal gift tax that is due, the IRS can demand payment of the gift tax from the donee, even if more than ten years have passed since the gift was made. In this reported […]

Take-Away: With the recent focus on obtaining an income tax basis ‘step-up’ to assets on an individual’s death, there is a lot of discussion with regard to terminating existing credit shelter trusts and returning trust assets to the lifetime beneficiary of that trust, so that upon the beneficiary’s subsequent death those distributed trust assets will […]

Take-Away: The current low interest rates, as reported in October’s IRC 7520’s rates, are attractive for may estate planning strategies like intra-family loans, grantor retained annuity trusts (GRATs), charitable lead annuity trusts (CLATs), and charitable gifts of remainder interests in homes and farms. These same low interest rates have an opposite effect, however, on qualified […]

Take-Away: Assuming the SECURE Act passes, expected to be late this calendar year, there should be no impact on IRAs and qualified plans that name the owner’s surviving spouse as the beneficiary of the retirement account. However, a surviving spouse may be more inclined to make a qualified disclaimer of some of those inherited retirement […]

Take-Away: We will soon enter a new era when it comes to dealing with inherited IRAs and qualified plan accounts once the Senate passes its version of the SECURE Act. Congress’ stealth tax, by accelerating taxable distributions from IRAs and qualified plans, will force many who planned to leave their retirement accounts to their children […]

Take-Away: As the passage of the SECURE Act seems imminent, many individuals with large IRAs are starting to revisit how those IRAs are handled at the time of their deaths. Conventional wisdom of the past may no longer apply if there is a mandatory 10-year payout to inherited IRAs and other qualified retirement accounts. Background: […]

Take-Away: Late last week the IRS published Revenue Procedure 2019-38  in anattempt to provide some clarity when the owner of rental real estate can claim the IRC 199A 20% qualified income tax deduction. While some clarity is provided, there is still doubt about whether the owner of real estate leased on a ‘triple net’ lease […]

Take-Away: Anyone who has had even a remote connection with Michigan’s real property tax transfer rules will readily conclude that those rules are frequently counter-intuitive  and which often lead to ‘gotcha’ results. Yet another reported decision of the Michigan Court of Appeals confirmed that many of the ‘uncapping’ taxable value rules are nonsensical  lay-in-wait traps […]