Archive for the ‘Estate’ Category

The qualfied personal residential trust is a practical strategy for managing your estate tax exposure, especially with the potential of significant changes to the estate tax law in the next year.  In 2013 the estate tax is schedule to return to the 2001 rates and UTC.  This may mean a substantial increase in estate tax [...]

There are many seminars on forming revocable trusts, with the primary purpose is to avoid probate and the associated costs and exposure to creditors.  However from a practical matter, probate will occur no matter what no matter what for most individuals and thus the cost savings is minmal.  Besides the cost of probate is to execute [...]

Funding a 529 plan for a child’s education by a gift to the child, may help get assets off your balance sheet and help minimize your estate tax exposure, but caution must be oaid for two reasons.  First, setting up the trust for in someone else’s name means you give up control.  If the child [...]

The estate tax was temporary “fixed” to protect the vast marjority of Americans from its effects.  However that was fixed until January 1, 2013 and a major planning nightmare is just around the corner.  Currently most married couples will be able to exclude $10,000,000 from any estate tax liability, without having to do anything.  However come the first [...]

The Unified Tax Credit is a misunderstood number and most Financial Planning Software packages poorly illustrate its true value, and even fewer retirement planning software tools even do an estate tax calculation at all,  ExecPlan Express financial planning software does both.  The UTC is often mistaken as the amount of your total assets that you can exclude [...]

An ILIT, irrevocable life insurance trust are primarily used for estate planning to shelter assets from estate tax exposure.  Financial calculators or free retirement planning software will not help you evaluate this use of a  complex asset like an ILIT in your estate planning strategy, instead you will need a tax and financial planning software package like ExecPlan [...]

Comprehensive financial planning is more than a simple retirement planning projection.  With the high UTC for the past several years, many financial planners have put aside estate planning to focus on long term goals such as retirement, education planning and investment planning.  However without congressional action, the estate tax is schedule for significant changes for [...]

It is easy to foget that the raise in estate tax exemption is about to disappear, after all it was over a year ago that  it was raised to $5,000,000 for singles and $10,000,000 four couples with a lower tax rate of 35%.  However that was temporary and is scheduled to return on January 1, [...]

Once a popular tool for saving for college and sheltering investment income from taxation, the UGMA, unified gift to minor’s account haspretty much faded away and for good reason.  The advent of 529 plans has eliminated any value UGMAs had.  In addition the “kiddie” tax makes the taxation on these accountsno better than if held [...]

Sometime the quickest and easiestplanning comes from something you woul do anyway, and charitable gifitng is one of those things that timing can mean everything.  This is especially true for those who can push income forward or take it now.  The same applies to gifiting charity, if you are going to have a sginifcant amount [...]