To prevent you and your family members from enduring more stress, misery or confusion than necessary, here are five estate-planning booboos to avoid …
Think you have the right ideas when it comes to your Houston estate? You may want to watch out for some common "don'ts" in the estate planning world.
The Financial Post's recent article, titled "‘Your grandfather’s dead. It’s my money now': Five estate-planning mistakes to avoid," discusses some typical estate planning mistakes.
“Income-tax rates are going up so it becomes more expensive for a grantor to maintain the grantor trust status of a trust they’ve set up,” says Lynn Halpern Lederman, managing director and senior fiduciary counsel – Northeast Region at Bessemer Trust, a New York firm that oversees $97.5 billion.
A Wall Street Journal article, titled "Rethinking Some Grantor Trusts," says that the latest bull market created potentially substantial taxable gains for individuals—and with the top federal rate on long-term capital gains at nearly 24%, as compared to 15% in 2012—there's a concern that some people may have a harder time paying that income tax bill.
How does this affect grantor trusts?
A well-planned estate is a wonderful legacy you can leave your heirs — instead of untangling a messy estate, they can follow concrete steps, allowing them to take care of business while mourning their loved one.
Document gathering can be overwhelming when it come to a loved one's passing. What about when you are no longer here? Will your loved ones be able to gather the appropriate information for your estate?
Newsday's recent article, titled "Estate planning: Putting affairs in order before death," lists the basic documents you will need prior to passing away.
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.
"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.
Houston Estate Planning and Elder Law Attorney Blog