Your Question: Decedent dies, pretty much insolvent with a mortgage debt greater than the equity in the decedent’s home. Decedent’s life was insured, with the designated beneficiaries of the life insurance policy being the decedent’s siblings. Can creditors of the decedent’s estate, i.e. the mortgagee,  attach the death benefit that is payable to the decedent’s […]

Take Away: While Durable Powers of Attorney are an extremely helpful estate planning tool, they can also cause tax and liability concerns to the individuals who hold the power of attorney. While the temptation of many lawyers who draft durable powers of attorney is to include the ‘kitchen sink’ of powers in the instrument, more […]

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 […]