Modern life creates some distasteful situations. Marriages fail. Wealthy clients want to cut off estranged wives and husbands. Or there's a remarriage and a desire to leave more to the children than to the second wife. Or, a surviving spouse's...
The impact of decisions that planners make about GRATs in transferring wealth can now be more precisely quantified. Advances in quantitative modeling and capital-markets forecasting allow us to evaluate the interactions among the moving parts that...
Ask the typical financial advisor if he provides advanced-planning services, and you are likely to receive an affirmative reply 99 percent of the time. This speaks succinctly to the industry's misconceptions about advanced planning. It is not a...
On June 20, all professionals who practice before the Internal Revenue Service and provide tax opinions must change the way they do business. On that date, the now infamous Circular 230 goes into effect, with compliance language so broad it...
For the fourth time in as many years, the House of Representatives voted on April 13 to repeal the federal estate tax. If what Republicans deride as the death tax survives, it'll be because once again cooler heads prevail in the Senate. Many...
Gideon Rothschild, partner in the New York-based Moses & Singer LLP and specialist in asset protection, reports: If a wealthy client could possibly go bankrupt in the next 10 years, now is the time for him to move his assets into an offshore trust...
In December 2003, the Internal Revenue Service issued new regulations governing the definition of trust income for federal tax purposes. These regulations create significant planning opportunities as well as some potential pitfalls. There are...
In the wake of the Terry Schiavo case and the death of Pope John Paul II many clients are focusing on end-of-life issues, particularly those surrounding life support and the final wishes of an incapacitated patient. Financial concerns, of course...
Say you meet up with a married couple in their mid 60s with three adult children and a net worth of $3 million $1.5 million in his IRA, $500,000 in their home and $1 million in nonretirement mutual funds. Since the husband is likely to die first...
