Let our advance worrying become advance thinking and planning. Winston Churchill
Let our advance worrying become advance thinking and planning. Winston Churchill
You and your spouse have decided you need to do some estate planning, and you’re finally sitting down with an attorney to do same. He or she starts talking about a will for you and a will for your spouse. A trust for you and a trust for your spouse. And a . . . […]
As anyone who’s read my profile knows, I once wrote for Bloomberg–for three Bloomberg magazines, in fact. One of them was Bloomberg Wealth Manager, which was later sold and then sold again. I continued to write for the magazine in all its iterations. The other day, I stumbled upon a list of some of my […]
Actually, this is not a quote but a paraphrase of some information I found the other day on the Internet. Can’t remember the source–I think I may have found it on Farm Bureau website and repeated in a variety of other places, including a Nationwide Insurance brochure I discovered online. With that, this: Almost 97% […]
So I sometimes forget that everybody’s smart, just on different subjects. For example, I don’t know much about physics. My teachers tried, but my head could only hold so much gravity and speed of light and such. Well, today I was online in an online forum where non-lawyers posed legal questions to attorneys. These were […]
I just took a call from a fellow who asked a very good question: Why not use my revocable living trust as a gun trust? The short answer to that question is, “because.” But if that’s too short for you, here’s a longer version I gave him–in bullet points: Guns are not like virtually any […]
Those who inherit fortunes are frequently more of a problem than those who made them. Congolese Proverb
Ok, so in my first post on the Empty Chamber Indicator, I referred rather cryptically to the television production Behind the Scenes, indicating I might report back later. Well, it’s later. Yesterday I returned to my office to find a phone message from a man asking me to call Michael Alexander, the producer of Behind the Scenes, […]
I’ve just finished reading the Estate of Purdue case, a tax court case decided in December. The case is interesting as an introduction to sophisticated tax planning strategies–FLLC, trusts, and all that. However, the real lesson from this case–and others like it–is that facts matter to courts. In this case, the IRS was contending that […]
That happened in the Estate of Purdue case decided on December 28, 2015–less than three months ago. And you can read a brief summary of why in the instructively titled article Attention to How Your Farm Business is Organized Pays Off for the Heirs at Tax Time. Bottom line, a family limited liability company formed with […]