File this under “Financial Planning 101.” What to do when a big client’s big bonus and severance package may be the future legal target of disgruntled employees and shareholders?
Despite her sole discretion over a trust, a decedent did not possess at the time of her death a general power of appointment over property in the trust. In Technical Advice Memorandum 200847015 (July 30, 2008), the decedent's husband's will...
Despite her sole discretion over a trust, a decedent did not possess at the time of her death a general power of appointment over property in the trust. In Technical Advice Memorandum 200847015 (July 30, 2008), the decedent's husband's will...
Although the introduction to Megan Pendleton's Intestate Inheritance Claims: Determining a Child's Right to Inherit When Biological and Presumptive Paternity Overlap suggests an exploration of the new forms of American family that result...
These days everyone is suffering. The media has been all over the story of the credit bust, the drop in housing values, the stock market's dive since Labor Day, and how these events have wiped out the American Dream. Financial advisors and other...
For some time, prominent commentators have requested that the Internal Revenue Service publish official guidance to deal with this increasingly common scenario:1 A deceased spouse's IRA is payable to a trust in which the surviving spouse is the...
Legendary screen actor Paul Newman probably died a wealthy man. We can't know for sure just looking at his will. But we can see that the will was as smart and straight-forward as Newman's career. The will, a public document that does not state the...
The growing number of retirees, their increased life expectancies and the size of their savings led us to wonder: How much accumulated income-producing wealth is needed to maintain a desired lifestyle? In other words, given a target level of...
During the course of an estate's administration, a personal representative performs four basic functions: (1) marshals assets; (2) determines and raises cash needs; (3) pays reasonable funeral expenses, debts, administration expenses and taxes...
There's an important yet unspoken phenomenon in the world of estate tax: As the number of estate tax filings has been decreasing nationwide since 2001, there's been a corresponding increase in the Internal Revenue Service's audit coverage rate of...
