From Bloomberg: “For more than a half-century, Mr. Bartley’s Burger Cottage has been a Harvard Square institution. Six days a week, college students line up around the block for creations that include the People’s Republic of Cambridge, a hamburger topped with coleslaw and Russian dressing, and the Chris Christie, which is fortified with marinara sauce […]
“An often-neglected requirement of federal crop insurance is that the insured producer maintain complete records of crop production, harvesting, disposition, and inputs. Farm clients should be advised that they are to keep records of production and marketing for each crop by insurance unit. These records are an extremely valuable asset to the modern row crop operation, […]
I’ve been reading Steven B. Gorin’s massive “book” (he calls the 1053 page PDF a “mere compilation of preliminary ideas”) titled Structuring Ownership of Privately Owned Businesses: Taxation and Estate Planning Implications. I’ve yet to do a deep dive–again, it’s 1053 pages of very dense, complicated reading–but I will. And I will because it’s chock […]
A lot of wisdom in this quote and just one more reason to consider leaving your children’s inheritance in trust rather than giving it to them outright: “Those who inherit fortunes are frequently more of a problem than those who made them.” Congolese Proverb
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. […]
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 […]