Estate planners can learn from financial planners. For years, financial planners have used hedging techniques to reduce risk or to guarantee a desired outcome. This is done by entering into a transaction that moves in the opposite direction as the...
The Internal Revenue Service released Notice 2008-13 on Jan. 2, 2008, to provide interim guidance on the application of tax preparer return penalties put in place by The Small Business and Work Opportunity Act of 2007.
Let's look at the recent past, the better to see what the future of the estate tax will be in the years 2009, 2010, 2011 and beyond. My predictions about what we can expect are based on the Nov. 14, 2007 Senate Finance Committee (SFC) hearing...
Low Internal Revenue Service discount rates make this an ideal time to use grantor retained annuity trusts (GRATs), as it's easier now to get over the hurdle that makes the GRAT effective. Still, the fact that one has to beat the IRS discount rate...
The shock of actor Heath Ledger's untimely death has passed, but questions still linger. Although only 28 when he died, Ledger had a will. Yet the multi-millionaire left his only child with a mere $145,000. The baffling part is: Why would someone...
To stop individuals who are on the verge of filing for bankruptcy from moving their wealth to states with laws that might better help them keep their assets, the Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act of 2005 (the 2005 Bankruptcy...
The engagement letter is here to stay and constitutes best practice for both lawyers and clients in estate planning. But it wasn't always so. Indeed, the use of engagement letters is a relatively new phenomenon. For generations, a simple...
A series of private letter rulings over the past several years seemed to indicate that a gift to a predeceased spouse would qualify for the gift tax marital deduction and enable use of that spouse's estate tax applicable exclusion amount. In...
A combination of tax-free gifts to grantor trusts and grantor-retained annuity trusts (GRATs) can be a powerful way to transfer wealth. Sophisticated quantitative modeling and capital markets forecasting demonstrate that even a client with a very...
