Nicholas Pritzker had nothing but brains and energy when he came to America from Kiev in 1881 as a 10-year-old. More than a century later, his heirs sat atop a $15 billion enterprise built on real estate development, manufacturing and the Hyatt...
The Tax Court's second opinion in the now famous Estate of Strangi v. Commissioner (Strangi II)1 sent shockwaves throughout the estate-planning profession and created new stumbling blocks for practitioners who create family limited investment...
The enactment of the Small Business Job Protection Act of 1996 expanded the differences in grantor trust rules for foreign and domestic trusts. At the same time, it narrowed the distributable net income (DNI) computation rules for foreign trusts...
What some have called a perfect storm is lashing the American defined-benefit (DB) pension fund industry. If a few years ago I tried to imagine the worst possible combination of events that could harm the industry, I might have dreamed up today's...
When the time comes to form a trust, there are no hard-and-fast rules about the trust's beneficiaries, size, goals or duration. But a recent survey did find one common thread: The more money people have, the more likely they are to choose a...
Perhaps the hardest words an advisor has to speak are these: I don't know. Sure, they have the advantage of making an advisor look confident and ethical enough to speak the truth, but they also leave the speaker feeling inadequate. Experience is...
Even as the three-year bear market recedes in memory, the experience of one rep illustrates how those lean years are not yet through with the brokerage employment market. The rep, a Milwaukee-based independent who asked to be identified as David K...
Ordinarily, serious investors aim to steer clear of financial instruments that are sold on late-night infomercials, but tax liens on real estate might well be the exception to this rule. In fact, the very things that makes such investments seem...
If you read the papers, it would appear that America's 95 million mutual fund holders have been systematically defrauded out of millions of dollars over the last several years. Abusive trading, late trading and brokerages' preferred vendor lists...
Attention shoppers: Those of you looking to purchase a financial advisory practice should be prepared for an arduous search. For every practice sporting a For Sale sign, there are 30 or 40 potential buyers out there, according to FP Transitions, a...
