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At David A. Handler's request, a New York-based team of the Wealth Management Group at Bernstein Global Wealth Management did an analysis of the economic benefits of financed gifts as compared to a sale to grantor trust. Here's the report: To...
One of the questions that practitioners ponder is how to properly discount the value of stock in a closely held C corporation to reflect the future income tax liability on the corporation's unrealized built-in gains (BIGs). For transfer-tax...
Dear federal lawmakers: It's time to change the law so that individual retirement account custodians, not the elderly, are responsible for withdrawing the required minimum distributions (RMDs) from their IRA accounts. Let's stop expecting the...
You might think of the gift tax as the lesser of two evils for transferring wealth, with the other evil being the estate tax. Certainly, it can be cheaper to pay gift tax rather than estate tax, because of the gift tax's nature.1 But always...
In a bull market, one of the best ways to transfer wealth is by a sale to a grantor trust. Little wonder that it's been so popular for the past 20 years. But a net gift coupled with a loan for the gift tax can transfer more wealth and at a faster...
Financial advisors are, apparently, hungry for insurance: Two-thirds of registered reps plan to sell more life insurance products over the next two years. And most reps consider insurance an especially important part of an individual's financial...
The wobbly economy and plunging stock market might cause some of your clients to start thinking less about charitable giving and more about charitable receiving. But for those not lining up at the local soup kitchen, the motivation to give to...
Clients who have children heading off to college next year and beyond are facing a convergence of events that will drastically reduce the typical family's ability to cover those higher education expenses. Most of the clients' myriad sources of...
You don’t often see states’ slayer statutes invoked. We encounter them only rarely in our practice, and when we do, it’s in cases that generally go unreported.
Next year, no matter how preoccupied the federal government is and no matter who is president, a new federal estate tax law is quite likely to be adopted. If it isn't, on Jan. 1, 2010, the U.S. federal estate tax will disappear at least for...