One big advantage of the trusteed IRAs: IRA owners can prevent their beneficiaries from spending down the accounts right away.
An IRA is a very powerful tool, if you use it right. Your IRA can essentially serve estate planning purposes beyond simple retirement funding in the form of a “trusteed IRA.”
A good place to start your education is a recent MarketWatch article titled “Trusteed IRAs Can Help Heirs Manage Inheritance.”
If your beneficiaries are out-of-date, when you die, your assets could go [to] the wrong people – a former spouse, for example – no matter what your will says.
Often, the biggest mistakes we can make when it comes to our estate planning are also some of the easiest to prevent. For example, the consequences of failing to update your beneficiary designations can be catastrophic, while the “fix” is as easy as a phone call or completing a paper (or online) form.
A recent Forbes article titled “The Big Estate-Planning Goof You May Be Making” puts the importance of proper beneficiary designations in perspective.
While your goal might be to attract the most qualified buyer that will pay the asking price and lead the company on a path of continued success, it is what you expect of your life post-sale that should constitute how you execute the deal.
Done right, a business succession or sale requires the ability to ask the right questions, let alone have the right answers. And there is no shortage of good questions to ask of yourself, your company, your family, and of course, the potential buyer.
Fortunately, a recent article in The Business Journals titled “Key questions to ask when planning to sell your business” will give you a head start on the questions, but you must supply the answers.
What would happen to your e-mail accounts if you suddenly died?
Are familiar with the notion of a digital estate? What happens to your online bank accounts, emails, social media and your entire digital presence on the web when you pass away?
Imagine a world without you in which your heirs cannot access your digital assets. They cannot access your e-mails, either practically or legally, to get to important legal or financial information, whether about bank accounts or friends. Sadly, that is the reality in most scenarios today.
You can stuff a lot of money into a 529 college savings plan now and then do the same thing at the beginning of 2014 – a strategy that advisers say they are seeing many wealthy clients adopt this year.
Funding a 529 College Savings Plan before year-end is a great gifting strategy your college-bound grandkids. They will surely appreciate your gesture! And if you wanted to take that gift one step further, did you know you can actually super-fund it?
As though just funding a 529 were not good enough, Reuters provided the skinny on super-funding recently in an article titled “Should you super-fund your 529 college savings plan?”
Aging parents need to establish a plan and communicate it with their adult kids — and adult kids need to ask their parents about their finances.
In our own lives, our parents start and run the money conversations from that first allowance to gearing up for those college loans and beyond. Later in life, the roles are reversed and our elderly parents might need a money conversation about their own future and well-being. Unfortunately, to make that conversation happen, it may be up to the adult children to take the lead.
Yes, it is truly a role reversal and often an important one. How do you start “the talk” and get it right?
Here are the must-do estate-plan tasks you should get done now.
What's on your list of New Year's resolutions? Yes, it's that time of year yet again. In addition to the normal list of diet, exercise and the sort — did "estate planning" make the list for 2014?
We all know that an estate plan is a matter of personal responsibility. No one truly can plan your estate for you, at least like you would. Trouble is, you might know what needs to get done, and you might have put it on that master to-do list, but you still need to have the resolve to get it done. For many of us, estate planning is that perennial subject on the to-do list.
"You cannot predict what may happen between now and receiving an inheritance," said Ireland. "The earlier you start preparing, the more financially secure your own retirement is likely to be."
Planning for an inheritance can be a tricky endeavor, for both givers and receivers. On one side, the giver has to make appropriate arrangements for their estate in order to fulfill their wishes and bequests. And on the other side, the future heirs have to consider how they intend to handle their gifts. Both need to be prepared if there is an unforeseen change of plans.
According to a recent CNN Money article titled “Average American inheritance: $177,000,” it is a tale of two facts:
Some wealthy people are taking another look at survivorship insurance. The relatively obscure product, also known as "second-to die" insurance, insures two lives, usually spouses, with one policy.Like its name indicates, the product pays out the benefit after the death of the second insured.
Where there is a risk and an attending financial exposure you cannot afford, there is a form of insurance to cover that risk exposure. When it comes to the ultimate risk – your family’s risk of losing you – life insurance is the fundamental solution. But what if there are two spouses? Naturally, financial risk is felt by the survivor at the passing of the first. That is why almost everyone needs some form of life insurance to provide for the surviving spouse. However, when there is some quantifiable financial risk left behind when the survivor passes, then there is a special form of life insurance to cover such exposure. It is called “survivorship life insurance.”
For the basics on survivorship insurance, consider reading a recent Forbes article titled “Sales of Survivorship Insurance Gain.”
To ensure your exit goals are met and your family relationships remain intact, it's important to clarify the family succession process right from the start.
When you are a family business owner looking to pass the torch, the business is typically your greatest asset and likely the center of the family's wellbeing. You cannot afford to mess this up.
Succession planning is unique because business is business, and so a successful succession is a careful one.
