As Election Day 2006 approaches, state politicians increasingly set their sights on a familiar political enemy: taxes. While all taxes make popular targets, this year state estate taxes are attracting heightened attention. In her state-of-the...
The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) has released a seminal report on tax information collection and exchange practices in 82 countries. The principal achievement of this long-awaited report, Tax-Cooperation Towards a...
Over the past few years, our clients' estate and life insurance planning have become far more complicated than they bargained for. Even if clients' personal situations and objectives were relatively static, which is a bold presumption, factors...
Advisors often have trouble convincing the wealthy to make charitable gifts while they're still alive. Indeed, for years, Ann Landers, the famous personal advice columnist, prodded her friend Warren E. Buffett, one of the richest men in the world...
Two recent legislative developments may enhance the attractiveness of Internal Revenue Code Section 529 savings accounts over other methods of saving for higher education expenses for certain individuals. One increased the kiddie tax age to 18...
Many advisors assume that domestic asset protection trusts (DAPTs) self-settled trusts established in the United States typically to protect trust assets from a beneficiary's creditors are created exclusively for high-risk professionals, such as...
In theory, a trust is administered to effectuate a grantor's intentions for establishing it. In practice, most trusts don't accomplish this goal. That's usually because the operative documents fail to provide sufficient guidance. Trustees are left...
