Estate Tax Exemption for 2015

According to this Wall Street Journal article, the rise is now official. When the new estate tax laws were passed at the beginning of 2013, the law set the applicable exclusion amount (the value of assets that an individual can pass without any estate taxes) at $5,000,000. That amount was indexed for inflation based on the consumer price index back to

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7 Tips From Philip Seymour Hoffman, Gandolfini, & Other Celeb Estates

What do Philip Seymour Hoffman, James Gandolfini, Heath Ledger, and Amy Winehouse have in common? Unfortunately, two things: an unexpected and early demise and the other — problematic estate issues. This Forbes article from earlier this year provides some key lessons to take away from these celebrities’ untimely passings. There are numerous stories about families having to go through the same

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Money Stumbles For You To Avoid

Consumer Reports magazine highlights the top “7 money stumbles to avoid,” and lists “not updating your [estate plan] and beneficiaries” as the number one stumble. The article highlights CR’s finding that 86% of respondents hadn’t updated their estate planning documents or beneficiary designations within the previous five years and then talks about situations in which that might cause problems. Kaiser Law

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Digital Assets

An article on Wall Street Journal has this advice to give: “With Estate Planning, Don’t Forget Virtual Assets.” Failing to include provisions for virtual assets in a will could lead to real-world losses if the surviving spouse or beneficiaries are unable to access the deceased’s online accounts. Here are just a few samples of the digital assets with obvious financial value:

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Values Before Valuables

We do estate planning because we want to make sure that our loved ones are taken care of at the time of our passing. At the very least, we would want our wealth to be preserved and distributed according to our wishes in order to provide the ones we leave behind with financial stability. While the purchase of life insurance and

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Two Sides of the Same Coin

In a recent Wall Street Journal article entitled, “Clients for Venus”, female financial advisers describe how women tend to take a different approach from men when it comes to financial planning: “Men are extremely competitive about money management. They think, ‘how much money can I make and how much more is it than the benchmark or the guy sitting next to

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Poor Decision Making of 20-somethings Explained

I frequently counsel families on the benefits of continuing trusts. The old method of giving children outright distributions or staging the distributions at ages 21, 25 and 30 not only increases the likelihood of the beneficiary making a poor decision with the funds, but doesn’t offer any of the protective benefits of trusts. A recent article on Wall Street Journal explains why

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Top Celebrity Estate Planning Mistakes

There’s something about watching celebrities acting like “real people” and making mistakes that seems to appeal to viewers, as proven by the continuing popularity of reality TV shows. A Forbes article on “What We Can Learn From Celebrity Estate Planning Gone Wrong” shows that the estate planning foibles of the rich and famous are no exception – there’s already a show

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Holographic Wills

Thomas Kinkade was a self-named “painter of light”, whose mass-produced works of art are estimated to grace one in every twenty American homes. Following his untimely death on April 6, 2012, however, his most famous pieces are turning out to be a couple of holographic wills he left to his girlfriend of 18 months, Amy Pinto-Walsh. The wills bequeath Pinto-Walsh with

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Life Event Changes

Previous blog posts discussed how the wills left behind by famous figures such as Whitney Houston and Thomas Kinkade will likely go through a lengthy and expensive probate court that could have been avoided if they had updated their estate planning documents after life changing events. A recent Forbes article lists 5 Life Event Changes That Require An Estate Planning Review:

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