Is an Income-Tax Time Bomb Lurking in Your Estate Plan?
As the federal estate tax exemption has ballooned from $5 million in 2011 to $13.99 million today, the need for estate tax planning has drastically decreased. However, with a top ...
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Undoing an Irrevocable Life Insurance Trust: Options and Alternatives in a Changing Estate Tax Landscape
The irrevocable life insurance trust (ILIT) has long been a staple of estate planning. This tool is designed to hold life insurance policies and remove the death benefit proceeds from ...
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Remember Your First Line of Defense: Insurance
The modern insurance market dates to seventeenth-century London, where merchants reeling from the Great Fire of London started pooling funds to cover fire losses. Today, this same basic concept—pooling risk ...
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Could a Domestic Asset Protection Trust Be the Right Trust for You?
There are more ways to create wealth today than ever before. Whether you are working a traditional nine-to-five job and investing in the stock market, a full-time investor taking advantage ...
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Are You Saving Enough for Retirement?
Retirement is supposed to be a carefree period of enjoyment and fulfillment. However, retirement has become a daunting prospect for many Americans, full of anxiety and financial uncertainty. Longer lives ...
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The Pros and Cons of Joint Ownership
If you are recently married or have been married for a while and have acquired additional money or property (or plan to), you have options regarding how your assets can ...
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Your Post-Honeymoon Legal Checklist
Your wedding day was absolutely perfect. You and your spouse went on your honeymoon and had the time of your lives. Now you are back and can breathe a sigh ...
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Beneficiary and Transfer-on-Death Designations: Are You Doing It Right?
Do you know which of your accounts have beneficiary designations, sometimes called transfer-on-death (TOD) or payable-on-death (POD) designations? Have you updated them recently? Are you aware of what can go ...
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Do You Know What You Own?
Americans’ median household net worth (meaning half the households have more and half the households have less) is around $193,000, while the average net worth is just over $1 million, ...
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Who is Part of Your Professional Team?
If you are like most Americans, you have at least one to-do list. You might also use lists when you are shopping, brainstorming, setting goals, and planning for events. To-do ...
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Ensure That Your Loved Ones Call the Right Doctor
Now that we are in March, we are well past the point at which most of us have abandoned our New Year’s resolutions. As in previous years, improving physical health ...
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Beware of Trust Scams—and How to Spot Them
Trusts are widely used in estate planning to protect and transfer a person’s assets (money, accounts, property, etc.), sometimes in a tax-advantaged manner. Some trusts are highly complex, with multiple ...
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Spousal Lifetime Access Trusts (SLAT)
No one wants to pay more taxes than they have to. To carry out this objective, many people search for the perfect estate planning tool that will allow them to ...
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Why You Need to Worry About Incapacity Planning
Death is the elephant in the room when we talk about estate planning. We often use phrases like pass away and pass on to make our meetings feel more comfortable ...
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Whom Do You Trust to Make Your Financial Decisions?
You wake up and check your investments over a cup of coffee. That tech stock you have been eyeing continues to trend upward, so you log in to your online ...
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