If your family is like many who own a business, you intend to keep it in the family across generations. However, it is also an asset that offers potential security after you pass, regardless of whether the company remains in the family.
Estate Planning
What is an Estate Tax Freeze?
An estate tax freeze is an asset management strategy by which you transfer ownership of some of your assets to your family members or other beneficiaries without triggering capital gains tax liability. Actually, the more appropriate term is estate freeze because what you’re doing is “freezing” the value of the transferred assets at their current fair market value. Their future appreciation will be attributed to your beneficiaries, not you. An estate freeze also gets the transferred assets out of your estate, thereby decreasing its value and the estate taxes it will have to pay upon your death.
If You Abandon Your Estate Plan, It Likely Will Abandon You When You Need It Most
Horror stories abound about all the ways estate plans can go awry. Here is another one, this time featuring abandonment as the main character.
Who Makes Up the DST Estate Planning Team?
When you desire to sell one of your highly appreciated assets and also wish to defer payment of capital gains taxes through utilization of the Deferred Sales Trust (DST), the first step of the process consists of meeting with the Estate Planning Team. But who exactly are the members of this elite professional team?
Top 5 Mistakes When Naming Beneficiaries of Insurance Policies
Naming the beneficiaries of an insurance policy seems likes an easy thing to do. If a person is married, the spouse is the beneficiary. The children are often named as contingent beneficiaries. If a person is not married but has children, the children are often named as first beneficiaries. Usually, these are the people that life insurance is intended to benefit, however, without knowing or considering the consequences of the beneficiary designation, the policy holder’s intended goals may be thwarted.