Asset Protection, Wills, Trusts, Estate & Business Planning
According to the court in Armstrong v. Armstrong, a 2015 Mississippi case, a paranoid schizophrenic who kills his 80 year-old mother with a crochet-covered brick, repeatedly stabs her, and then bleeds the body to prepare it for burial, might still inherit, since a willful killing under the state’s slayer statute requires not being completely insane. […]
Need a good story for a speech? Here’s one, courtesy of Bessemer Trust’s Steve R. Akers speaking at a CLE seminar I attended today at the Utah Bar in Salt Lake City. He got the story from Conrad Teitell, who spoke at this year’s Heckerling Institute (an annual estate planning conference) in Orlando: A son wanted […]
This is a little off topic, so please indulge me. When I’m not practicing law, I teach writing at Brigham Young University. Today in my Writing & Rhetoric 150 class, my students did what I refer to as Power of Words presentations. These are essentially 7-minute oral presentations about how words have affected the student’s […]
“A trust can be an effective foundation for asset protection planning. Trusts have been utilized for centuries as a means of conserving and protecting property for the beneficiaries of the trust. However, most domestic trusts do not provide protection from creditors. The typical revocable living trust, where the trustors are the lifetime beneficiaries and retain […]
Yesterday I read an interview in the April 2016 issue of WealthCounsel Quarterly with Neel Shah, a business and estate planning attorney in Monroe, New Jersey. The last interview question was of particular interest to me, because occasionally I find myself wondering whether I’m simply selling something when I encourage people to do their estate and business […]
I’ve listened to Dave Ramsey. My wife owns a couple of his books. I get what he does, and I think he probably does a some good–in the debt area, at least. But he’s not always right. For example, I don’t care for some of his opinions about life insurance and much of his investment […]
Professor, attorney, and author of Business Planning: Closely Held Enterprises, Dwight Drake has some useful advice for would-be entrepreneurs: “When the entrepreneurial bug bites a group of charged-up business owners, they usually are focused on making the business succeed, maximizing revenues, and minimizing expenses. They have little interest in discussing potential breakups, the risks of the three big […]
This is another, in a series, of posts that feature articles I wrote for Wealth Manager and other magazines. I actually had a lot of fun writing this one, Broken Vows, Solid Contracts: For many–if not most–love-struck couples, the words “prenuptial agreement” are anathema, a blanket so wet that it threatens to extinguish their burning […]
One of 12 reasons Edwin P. Morrow III, J.D., LL.M. gives for keeping assets in a trust rather than distributing them outright to beneficiaries at death, from his outline, The Optimal Basis Increase and Income Tax Efficiency Trust: A trust allows the grantor to make certain that the assets are managed and distributed according to his/her […]
So I have a friend who lives in Utah and wants a concealed carry permit. Unfortunately, he still drives on a Wyoming drivers license and doesn’t want to give it up. And because of this, he thought he couldn’t get a concealed carry permit, which is a reasonable assumption if you look at the FAQs […]