Year: 2015
Building a successful business takes hard work, careful planning and significant foresight. When a business has been able to maintain its success for a significant period of time, owners and/or executives must begin the task of succession planning. Family owned and operated businesses face particular challenges in this area. Building a family business is hard […]
“So don’t give away your money. There are other things you can do ahead of time. Talk to an elder law attorney to make sure you are maximizing your dollars, that you can still give your kids some kind of inheritance and still go into a skilled nursing home on Medicaid.” A recent article in […]
“An irrevocable trust is a trust generally created during someone’s lifetime that is exactly what it says — it can’t be revoked.” Tom Benson and his grandchildren are in a fight over the ownership of the New Orleans Saints NFL football team and the New Orleans Pelicans NBA basketball team after his death. The family […]
State Rep. Shawn Dooley is proposing a cut in the state estate tax as a way of keeping older residents and their assets in Massachusetts. Many non-professionals plan for the federal estate tax, but fail to account for the estate tax in their own states. This often leaves an unintended and unnecessary bill that must […]
The president proposes to tax capital gains at death rather than allow them to pass income-tax free to heirs as under current law. Did you catch President Obama’s State of the Union address last week? Make note of these interesting estate planning developments. President Obama rode into office, in part, by promising to increase taxes […]
For clients who have a collection of firearms, they can bring them into their estate plan and ensure they go to the right beneficiaries via a gun trust. What will happen to your gun collection when you pass? Do you have plans to gift the firearms to your heirs? Most gun collectors know the laws […]
Thomas Gilbert Jr. is accused of murdering his own father, a wealthy New York hedge fund founder who was fatally shot earlier this month. Could Gilbert inherit some of the fortune of the man he is accused of killing? Under the terms of his father’s estate plan, Thomas Gilbert Jr. is set to inherit a […]
A Queens woman loves her pet Maltese so much that she rewrote her will to leave the pooch a million-dollar fortune consisting of jewelry, a trust fund and vacation home. All a dog needs is a chew toy and a million dollar doghouse, right? So it is with Bell Mia, millionaire Maltese. It is often a good […]
The legacy of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. seems to be everywhere these days with the success of the film “Selma,” which begins with his being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. At the same time, a decidedly less heroic aspect of his legacy has been playing out here in court filings and hearings as his three surviving children […]
Area Congressman Mac Thornberry filed his first bill of the 114th Congress on its opening day. The Death Tax Repeal Act (H.R. 173) will completely and permanently repeal the Federal estate, gift, and generation-skipping taxes. The bill already has garnered 36 cosponsors. The estate tax is making headlines again, but this time the topic points to […]
