As 2014 dwindles down, it’s time to consider your year-end planning.
The holidays will be here before you know it, and that means the end of 2014 is near. Have you started your year-end planning yet?
A recent article in the Physician's Money Digest, titled "10 Financial Planning Tips for Year-end," offers some helpful financial planning tips for the year-end.
The new programs will be working with those in the private sector and nonprofits to help law enforcement attune to impalpable signals that could indicate mistreatment of this vulnerable population.
Los Angeles is taking a stand against elder abuse with new training programs for the private sector and nonprofits.
“Our office is in the forefront of domestic violence,” the City Attorney commented to the Los Angeles Daily News, as reported in an article titled "L.A. gets $1.6 million to combat elder abuse."
"If you make a will you can distribute the wealth as per your wish and avoid many hassles. It particularly becomes more complicated if there are immovable properties involved and there are disputes on the values of such properties," says Ashish Kehair, EVP and head – private wealth and international businesses, ICICI Securities.
Why do you need a will?
One of the big reasons to make a will is to distribute the wealth as you want and avoid many of the headaches and expenses for your heirs, especially when you have immovable properties and disputes over their value. This caution is discussing in a recent article in The Business Standard titled "Why you should make a will." If there is no will and more than one legal heir, the distribution of assets is conducted by the court under probate law. This can be time-consuming and cumbersome.
Home equity loans can be problematic if not done correctly and require careful attention to the rights of the surviving spouse, if you are married. And of course, the end of the process means you or your heirs give up your home. There are other ways to tap into your home’s equity that are worth considering. Here, we take a quick look at the top alternatives to reverse mortgages.
Is a reverse mortgage really the answer to your cash-flow needs? It all depends on your situation and the options at hand.
A recent Investopedia article, titled "5 Top Alternatives To A Reverse Mortgage," examines some of the top alternatives to reverse mortgages.
The legal dispute surrounding the roughly $200 million estate of the late Charlotte developer Henry Faison has been resolved, with his company winning forgiveness of more than $100 million in loans he’d extended to it.
In this recent court case filed by Faison's sons, Jay and Lane, they asked the court to force Henry's company to allow the assets, including $105 million in loans extended by Faison, to pass to his foundation. The dispute centers on Henry's June 2000 will, which left the residuary of his estate to Faison Enterprises.
Although the vast majority of estates aren't contested, the more money that is at stake, the more incentive a family member has to try to get some of it.
Certain family issues in the United Staes are unique to our country. However, some people tend to have the same behaviors and problems everywhere in the world.
One example is the tendency of people to fight over a wealthy estate. Whenever there is enough money involved in an estate to make it worth fighting over, people who are not happy with a distribution plan tend to fight anywhere in the world.
Six Philadelphia men forged, cheated and lied their way into collecting a dead woman's house and car, police said.
If no heirs exist and no estate plan determines where your estate should go, it must be up for grabs. Right? Well, no. But unfortunately for one woman's estate, this scenario was all too real.
In 2010, a Philadelphia widow named Dorothy Kennedy passed away. She did not have an estate plan or any known heirs. By law her property, including her house and car, should have become government property, assuming no heirs could ever be found. However, Kennedy's neighbor had other plans.
When Christie’s auctioned off Edgar Degas’s “Danseuses” for nearly $11 million in 2009, the catalog noted that the masterpiece was being sold as part of a restitution agreement with the “heirs of Ludwig and Margret Kainer,” German Jews whose vast art collection was seized by the Nazis in the years leading up to World War II. But now a dozen relatives of the Kainers are stepping forward to object.
If valuable art is stolen, but then recovered after the original owner passed away, who gets to claim it? And how long should the person or business who recovered the art look for the rightful heirs?
When the Nazis rose to power in Germany, the wealthy Jewish couple Ludwig and Margaret Kainer fled to France. They left behind a valuable art collection that included original Monets and Degas amongst other pieces. All of their valuables were confiscated by the Nazis. After the war and before any of that property could be recovered, the Kainers passed away. They had no children. The art ended up in the trust of Swiss Banks, which at least nominally transferred them to a foundation that had previously been set up by Mrs. Kainer's father.
The decision about how to designate beneficiaries for your company retirement plan, life insurance policies, and other assets might seem like a no-brainer. Chances are you would like those near and dear to you to inherit any money you've accumulated during your lifetime, so making sure that happens should be as simple as writing their names on the appropriate forms, right? Not so fast.
Have you designated beneficiaries on the appropriate accounts? Are you sure you did it right?
A good estate plan uses a wide-variety of vehicles to distribute the estate. Today, that normally means that retirement accounts and life insurance are used to help quickly distribute assets to heirs after someone passes away. Because of this importance, you need to know how to go about designating beneficiaries to receive the assets.
Donna Spears, a longtime friend of centenarian Helen Schlesinger, claims in her Manhattan civil suit that New York-Presbyterian physician Dr. Lawson Moyer has broken the law by both treating the 470 Park Ave. resident and appointing himself as her power of attorney.
Can you trust your doctor with your will?
A recent article in The New York Post, titled "Doctor wrote himself into 102-year-old patient's will: suit," tells the story of a lawsuit recently filed in New York. Helen Schlesinger is 102 years old and has assets worth millions of dollars. In 2003, she wrote a will leaving the bulk of her estate to her friend, Donna Spears, and an unnamed family member. Spears has filed a lawsuit against Dr. Lawson Moyer. She alleges that after he began caring for Schlesinger, Moyer rewrote her will. The new will allegedly gives Spears only $25,000. It also leaves $100,000 to Moyer with the remainder to be distributed to charities.
