Wealth Planning

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...

The IRA rollover to charity has been extended through 2009. Buried in the $700 billion banking bailout legislation (officially known as the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008) that was passed by Congress and signed by President George W...

The Internal Revenue Service has been concerned about whether retirement benefit plans qualify for the marital deduction when they're left to a trust that ordinarily qualifies for the marital deduction. Hard to believe that this would even be in...

Robert Craig Knievel, purportedly nicknamed by police after an arrest for stealing hubcaps off cars, was born on Oct. 17, 1938 in Butte, Mont., and died in Clearwater, Fla., on Nov. 20, 2007, at the age of 69. His will, recently made available to...

Multi-participant trusts1 have become immensely popular. These trusts replace the single, all-powerful trustee with a host of independent decisionmakers, all deriving their authority directly from the trust instrument. At first, we saw multi...

The model for a managing directed trustee (MDT) comes from organizations like family offices and private trust companies (PTCs) that evolved, in part, to support and coordinate a family's trustees and other financial services providers. Family...

If tested, most financial advisors worth their proverbial salt could pass a final exam for Beginning 529 Plans without much cramming beforehand. But clients saving for college have the unfortunate habit of posing problems that go beyond the...