After three decades as a financial planner, I’m seeing more and more clients reach, not just retirement, but their final years. An issue that becomes especially important at this stage of life is how to protect your financial resources from an unexpected threat—yourself. One of my saddest professional experiences came several years ago when one […]
Tag Archives | trusts
Estate Planning for Adult Children With Special Needs
April 28, 2014
The heart of estate planning, for many of us, comes down to one issue: taking care of family. We do our best to make decisions that we hope will be right for surviving spouses and children. Such decisions are especially challenging for parents of children with special needs. The question of “Who will take care […]
Are Credit Shelter Trusts Obsolete? No.
September 26, 2013
One of the more interesting debates in estate planning circles these days surrounds so-called credit shelter trusts. These are trusts set up as a way to preserve the full amount of estate tax exemption between a husband and wife. For example, when the tax rules said that each person could pass $1 million on to […]
Estate Planning Relief
February 14, 2013
The conventional wisdom among the attorneys and CPAs who plan for estate taxes, right up until the new Fiscal Cliff legislation was signed into law, was that the $5 million exemption was probably too good to be true. Couples could gift up to $10 million to their heirs without paying any gift taxes, and if […]
SD Trusts Get Even Better
August 19, 2010
It appears that South Dakota trust law is even better than I thought. In a response to my previous blog on SD trust law, Tom Simmons, an attorney practicing in Rapid City, SD, explained to me that I missed the latest improvement to SD trusts. Tom explains that in the administration of a living trust after the […]
