What You Need to Know!

Careful estate planning is necessary when planning for children or relatives with disabilities. The term “special needs” it is commonly used where there is someone in the family who is unable to make necessary legal, financial and overall life decisions for him or herself. The biggest fear is often “Who will take care of my loved ones and how will they be provided for after I am gone?” A Special Needs or Supplemental Needs Trust is a trust that preserves your loved one’s ability to receive Supplemental Security Income (SSI) and Medicaid benefits and can help you establish your wishes for how your loved one is provided for after your death. Owning a house, a car, furnishings, and some other personal items does not affect eligibility for SSI or Medicaid. But other assets, including having too much cash in the bank, will in fact disqualify your loved one from benefits. Leaving...

When planning their estates, many people want to remember a charity, cause, or organization with a monetary gift, an honorable impulse. But the vehicle you use to make the charitable bequest can have a great impact not only on your heirs, but also the organization you’re trying to support.   It’s a very common mistake to include all of your assets in a will or revocable trust, which can have unintended tax consequences. Fortunately, there are easy remedies.   Keep in mind that what your heirs will actually inherit after your demise are the assets you earmarked for them — after taxes. So, when deciding how to structure your will or revocable trust, you want to always assess the tax consequences to your heirs of any and all classes of assets.   In the mix of investments most retired people have, there is almost always an IRA or 401K, for which...

Recent changes to the tax code have raised the threshold for inheritance and gift tax to $11.2 million per person — a threshold most working people will not reach or exceed — and that’s caused some to speculate that estate planning is dead. But to paraphrase Mark Twain, rumors of its demise have been greatly exaggerated.   Instead, we’ve seen the emergence of legacy planning, which differs from traditional estate planning in several ways.   While estate planning in the past has been all about passing on as much of your assets as possible to your heirs and avoiding taxes, legacy planning talks about more than where the money goes, but also what you want to accomplish during your life and what you want to accomplish when you’re gone.   Your goal might be to preserve family wealth or to establish a blueprint so that a family business can continue to...