In May 1976, radio broadcaster Paul Harvey began a series of five-minute vignettes entitled The Rest of the Story. It was so popular that it continued until his death in 2009 a span of 33 years! He would recite what everyone and then (after a...

Estate planning in the context of second marriages is increasingly common and necessary in the evolving world in which we practice. Estate-planning techniques that are effective for spouses in first marriages may be unsuited when applied to...

In the ongoing family limited partnership (FLP) battle between taxpayers and the Internal Revenue Service, taxpayers have been able to achieve some significant victories over the past two years in the Tax Court, particularly in the face of IRS...

Legislators in Congress are reportedly considering creating a kind of Roth IRA version of the estate tax. On The Money, a blog of the congressional newspaper The Hill, this week said lawmakers are considering whether to let taxpayers have the...

The House of Representatives has passed, and now the Senate is considering, a bill that would dramatically curtail shorter-term and zeroed-out GRATs

Courts refuse to allow caregivers who married their incapacitated clients to get an elective share of the clients’ estates

When IRA custodians get nervous, they often need a private letter ruling to calm them down and tell them that what they're doing or planning to do is just fine. And that's what's happened over the past eight years in the context of whether to...

Financial professionals do it. Insurance professionals do it. Actuaries certainly do it. Yet we, as tax and estate planning professionals, all too often recommend techniques and strategies without doing it. And that is risk assessment. Time to...

Estate planners often must make a decision whether to recommend a family limited partnership (FLP) or family limited liability company (FLLC) to achieve the best federal estate tax savings for a client.1 While many considerations impact the choice...