Category: Estate Planning

The end of the year is the perfect time for reflection. If this year didn’t add up to all you’d hoped it would be and you want to start off on a better foot in the New Year, there are at least four goals you can’t afford to miss on your list.

Start by looking at your biggest debt, which is probably your home. Even if you know that it’s not feasible for pay off that mortgage totally in 2020, having a future date in mind when you do think that goal is achievable gives you something clear to work towards. If you’re nearing retirement age, factor in how this might influence your retirement spending, too. Can you target a payoff date early on in your retirement?

The next phase should be setting up a six month emergency fund. This is money you can tap into during a worst case scenario like a critical home repair or a sudden medical bill. Most people in the U.S. have no emergency savings fund at all.

The third phase to accomplishing your financial goals in 2020 is creating a full plan for how to look at your big financial picture. If you’re concerned about running out of money in retirement or whether you’ll need long-term care, the best time to put a place in motion for these issues in well in advance of an emergency situation.

If you are a few years away or even a decade away from retirement, expand your debt payoff plan from beyond just your home. Think about car payments, student loan debt, and credit card debt. All of these can create big expenses when you’re on a fixed income in retirement and don’t want to dip into your emergency fund or your overall savings to pay for regular costs.

Need help fitting your financial plan with your estate plan? Now is a great time to schedule a chance to speak with a dedicated estate planning lawyer about your options.

Getting together for the holidays or to celebrate the new year gives you a great opportunity to reconnect with your loved ones. But if one of the things on your to-do list this year is to discuss estate planning arrangements, you might be concerned about the possibility for conflict.

The good news is that there are delicate ways to handle this situation to decrease your chances of ending up in an argument with your loved ones. Estate planning is a very personal and individualized process, which means that the great deal of thinking you might have put into the process, won’t necessarily translate to your loved ones. And yet, planning before disability or death is one of the best gifts that you can give your family.

Many family members are embarrassed to discuss the topic of money, but might miss out on beneficial financial strategies like putting together trusts. If you’re thinking about using a trust as one of your estate planning strategies, however, you can increase your chances of success by communicating your financial values to your children early on.

When you have a conversation about trust and estate planning, approach this topic with care and respect. Be both considerate and candid. The next thing to consider is to rely on the insight from a knowledgeable estate planning attorney to verify that your estate planning is customized to the goals you intend to accomplish.

The investment that you spend in putting together an estate plan, especially involving a trust can payoff in spades for your loved ones when they understood why the trust was being used and when you have properly funded it. Schedule a consultation today with a dedicated estate planning lawyer to talk through more benefits of trust funding.       

Deciding to disinherit someone in your family is fraught with emotional considerations and concerns. Wondering whether or not you should inform the family member about your intention to exclude them from your estate planning can be a very difficult question to answer and one that you should discuss directly with your estate planning lawyer.

An estate planning attorney can help you put together the relevant strategies and tools to ensure that your estate planning goals are accomplished. In the event that you decide to inform your children that they are not receiving an inheritance, this conversation should be handled with care.

One common reason to decide not to pass on an inheritance to your children is because you believe that your money could serve a bigger and better purpose in your community. This doesn’t necessarily mean, however, that your loved ones will understand this decision that you have made.

If you intend to leave your assets behind to someone other than your family members, it’s important to communicate that plan now if you feel confident in your decision. Fleshing out your plan with your loved ones does allow them to be a part of the process, and ensures that you leave behind funds to pay for your final expenses. The last thing you want is to become a burden for your family financially.

You might need to adjust your estate plan in the future if you change your mind. This is why having an established relationship with an experienced estate planning lawyer can make this process easier. Explain to your children your reasons and decisions behind opting to pass on an inheritance or assets to other organizations or people than them.

This clears up expectations, but it doesn’t mean that this conversation will be easy. Discussing your missions, values and goals for your assets after you pass away can help your loved ones better understand the decision you’ve come to.        

Do you know how to decide whether or not you need a trust, a will, or both? Most people partner with an experienced estate planning lawyer when putting together their strategy for their estate.

A lawyer can help you review existing estate planning documents and help you decide what assets will be passed through a trust versus your will.

Attorney Neel Shah recently shared the difference between a will and a trust with the Tribune. He says, “A will is like leaving your family a recipe to bake a cake after you’ve passed away.” In this analogy, someone in your family would have to go buy the ingredients to make the cake and prepare them in the right order.

Putting together a trust, however, allows you to make the initial recipe while you’re still around. When you create a trust, you’d control how the cake is made and then you can decide who you’ll share this with through your trust.

One common reason people turn to a trust is because you put in the work today to make things easier for your loved ones in the future.

Even though a will might be easier and faster to put together, a trust equips you with more control and the flexibility many people prefer. With the added layer of privacy afforded by a trust, you also get peace of mind that your plans will be kept private between your trustees and your beneficiaries alone rather than becoming a matter of public record.

Far too many Americans overlook the potential benefits of estate planning because they believe it’s too difficult, not necessary for their specific situation or too expensive. But there can be major costs to ignoring components of your estate plan. Most people are familiar with the benefits afforded by a will, but a new study shows that up to 66% of Americans don’t have a healthcare directive.

A healthcare directive is a legal document in which you lay out your decisions for caregivers in the event that you suffer from dementia or another similar ailment.

It can also provide important guidance around whether or not you want life-sustaining care. Healthcare directives sometimes go under other names depending on your specific location, including medical directives, living wills, or durable health care powers of attorney.

In general, most of these documents serve the same function to provide direction and guidance around how the death and medical decisions affecting you should be made. Health care directives are truly a relatively new legal document because they only came into existence in 1976 in California when the first law was passed enabling health care directives.

By 1992, however, all 50 states across the country had similar laws. Make sure that you have incorporated your intention for a health care directive into your estate planning by sitting down and consulting with an experienced and knowledgeable estate planning lawyer.       

Have you thought about using various estate planning strategies, such as a trust, to establish some level of control and clarity during your estate planning process? The establishment of a family trust might be one specific way in which you intend to accomplish this goal.

There are several different key players involved in the establishment of a family trust, including the creator of the trust who is most often the person who possesses family wealth and has established an estate plan for the benefit of his or her family.

In addition to the trust creator, there are the beneficiaries of the trust who are typically the grandchildren or the children of the trust maker or settlor. These beneficiaries are the recipients of assets inside the trust in alignment with the terms established in the trust itself. Additionally, there are other parties, such as secondary beneficiaries who are eligible to receive the trust assets in the event that some even occurs that triggers the passing of assets to another generation, such as if the primary beneficiary has passed away. The final key person involved in the management of a family trust is the trustee who manages or oversees the operation of the trust and directs assets inside the trust in accordance with the settlor’s instructions when the trust was established.

One party who might also become eligible to trust assets is a non-beneficiary spouse, i.e. someone who is married to a beneficiary in the trust. Many families using the family trust will engage in the process of asset protection planning to attempt to minimize the possibility that a soon to be ex-spouse will be able to tap into those assets.       

If you own a company, you can’t afford to think just about the day to day. In fact, even planning ahead for your own company’s future while you are still involved might not be enough to protect your business from success long into the future. This is because you can’t afford to neglect the power of a process known as succession planning.

Succession planning refers to the process for developing, identifying, hiring and training new leaders who are eligible to replace older leaders when those leaders retire, pass away or leave. This process greatly increases the chances of capable and experienced employees being able to step in and assume these roles as they become available.

There are many different facets involved in succession planning and this process is most successful when it is implemented many years in advance of an owner thinking about leaving. This is because there are many components to establishing a leadership and transition plan and identifying and training the proper timeline to take over the company.

Organizations use succession planning as one process to ensure that the right employees have been recruited, developed, and trained to fill key roles within the company. Top talent employees should then exercise their skills, abilities, and knowledge to be prepared for a promotion and advancement into increasingly more challenging roles.

This gives the owners of the business and other key employees who are planning an exit in next several years the peace of mind that someone is there to step in to these important roles as needed in the future. If your business has not yet incorporated a succession planning into its long range goals, schedule a consultation with an experienced business succession planning lawyer today.       

In the event that you become incapacitated, it will be important for anyone you have named as a power of attorney agent to be able to make decisions on your behalf.

If you are incapacitated, you are unable to make these decisions for yourself, but without appropriate estate planning documents, appointing someone else to do this, this can create confusion, chaos or even court hearings for your family members.

It’s important to also think about how the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act known as HIPAA limits disclosure, release or use of any individually identifiable health information.

Power of attorney agents and a legal heir could be eligible to get access to this information in order to use it to act on your behalf. However, even though there might be other people that you want to be informed about your current health status, it is important to include these people in your estate planning process.

For example, if you have a significant other to whom you are not married, that person is not necessarily entitled to automatically receive information about your health status. If your parents are approved to receive information about your health status, but do not have a good relationship with your significant other or are unlikely to inform your significant other about current condition, this can generate problems.

Make sure that you think about who else should be included as a power of attorney agent when establishing your estate planning documents.          

The end of the year will quickly be here upon us. Many people have already started their holiday planning, but you can’t afford to neglect the opportunities that come with the burst of momentum to knock things off your to-do list and plan ahead for a successful 2020.

Yearend financial planning sets you up for success throughout the entire next year. Now is an excellent opportunity to review all of your key beneficiary designation forms and other documents in line with your estate plan. But don’t neglect the opportunity to establish a better and deeper understanding of what’s going on with your retirement contributions.

Now is a great time to evaluate whether or not you’re on track to max out your retirement contributions for the year. Whether you have an SEP IRA, a 401(k) or a 403(b), you might need to change how much you contribute if your plan allows for it. Think about any holiday bonuses that you might receive and these might be put into the plan as well. The contribution limit for your IRA for 2019 is $6000, but this jumps to $7000 if you are aged 50 or older.

This could be a good time to sit down with your financial professional to discuss setting up a Roth IRA by transferring your traditional IRA funds. All qualified withdrawals and future gains would be tax free even though you would pay taxes on the amount that you do convert.

For more information about getting ahead of your planning and tackling your financial goals before the end of the year, don’t neglect the opportunity to sit down with your estate planning attorney.      

There’s a good chance that if you’ve been active with philanthropy and charitable giving, that it’s been a part of your life for as long as you can remember. But it might be time to adjust that strategy before and after retirement after speaking with a knowledgeable and experienced estate planning attorney.

An estate planning attorney can help you to navigate this process and ensure that you have the information you need to leave a lasting impact on the charities of your choice.

Making the most of charitable gifting and giving can require some advanced strategy and the best way to give to charity in a tax intelligent way might depend on your age.

Effective tax planning can also give you peace of mind that a bigger portion of your donation has gone towards supporting the philanthropic goals and priorities that are most important to your family.

Many more families today are taking the standard deduction than ever before as a result of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. This means that fewer families are eligible to qualify for tax benefits from cash donations to charity. These strategies will depend on whether or not you’re required to take distributions from an employer sponsored 401(k) or an individual retirement account.

For those donors younger than age 70 and a half, appreciated securities can be a powerful way to support the charities you care about. Once you have reached age 70 and a half, under the new standard deduction, one of the best strategies is to gift a portion of your RMD or all of it to a charitable organization as a qualified charitable distribution. QCDs cannot be greater than $100,000 but can still be very powerful strategies for gifting to a charity you care about. Schedule a consultation with an experienced estate planning attorney today to learn more.       

Most of your organization today is probably digitized. There’s a good chance you own a scanner and have taken every effort to store what you can online.

But even though electronic wills might be a wave of the future in estate planning, they’re not here in full yet since most states don’t have a method for electronic will filing.

A true electronic will is one that can be drafted, reviewed, and validated all in electronic form. As of right now, e-wills don’t eliminate the current need for a traditional will. Over time, however, state legislatures might review the requirements for electronic wills to provide insight about how this might work.

It’s very likely that future versions of an electronic will still require the formal creation of the document as well as signatures by witnesses. Some state courts have already begun to analyze and recognition electronic wills, but those circumstances are limited up to this point.

Recently, the Uniform Law Commission has accepted an e-wills act known as the Uniform Electronic Wills Act. This organization is a group of legal professors and practitioners who are often the first voice of change in various practice areas. Many states tend to adopt similar laws after the ULC releases information about laws they’ve accepted.  

If you’d like to talk about how to create a will that works for your life circumstances now and in the future, set up a time to speak with an experienced and dedicated estate planning lawyer. A lawyer can guide you through how to incorporate the most appropriate estate planning strategies for your needs and your family.

As a corporate executive you have plenty of things on your plate and you probably don’t want to think about adding anymore, but there are several critical financial tasks that you can’t afford to neglect.

Even though corporate executives put in a lot of equity to get their money, they tend to devote very little time to managing it. Getting a head start on your financial and estate plan, however, can give you the peace of mind that you have planned for the future and assist you with managing this money in the most effective way.

After all you’re working hard for it and you should be able to plan for it to pay off dividends for you. Some of the most important steps you can take include:

• Contributing the maximum amount available to your 401(k) plan, especially if your company match is significant.
• Make sure that your wealth isn’t reliant entirely on an employer. Whether you get restricted stock grants, stock options or a 401(k) match, you want to make sure that you net worth doesn’t drop if the company stock price takes a dive or if you are no longer working there.
• Update an estate plan. Far too many people who are corporate executives don’t have a will at all, and for those who do, it’s usually so old that it’s no longer beneficial to them or their loved ones.

Make sure that you evaluate your will and other estate planning documents on an annual basis, and if you have put off creating a will up until now, it’s a great opportunity to schedule an appointment before the end of the year to cross this important task off your to-do list.      

If you’re looking for a plan to save money, elder law planning on your own might seem like an appealing option, even though the advantage could be potentially saving money now.

There are costly mistakes that you can make in the DIY elder law planning process, such as omissions, neglecting opportunities for protection, and errors that end up affecting you or your loved ones.

When it comes to protecting assets from the cost of nursing homes, and naming those people who will make financial, legal, and medical decisions in the event of a disability, it’s important to think about how an attorney can help you draft a legally valid healthcare proxy and power of attorney. There can be significant consequences if you simply find a form online print it out and fill it in.

The power of attorney form in different states could require different considerations, and since you want your elder law plans to be as accurate as possible for your individual state, you need to verify with your attorney that your document is indeed legally valid.

Healthcare proxies and powers of attorney, for example, should also have language that gives the named agent the authority to obtain all documents and medical information under HIPAA, the U. S. federal privacy law.

There’s too much left to chance when you engage in the process of DIY estate planning, and you could remove many of these barriers and hesitations by hiring an experienced and dedicated elder law planning attorney.      

The charges for home care are now rising faster than those associated with nursing home care, according to Genworth’s most recent cost of care survey. The median annual cost for home health aides rose 4.55% in 2019, whereas the median cost for a private nursing home room only increased by 1.82% to $102,000.

Getting support, whether it’s in a nursing home or in your own home, can be extremely costly, particularly if it decimates you and your spouse’s retirement savings. This study shows that long-term care is becoming increasingly expensive.

Consulting with an elder law attorney might be the only way for you to protect some of your personal assets from being used to support a spouse in a nursing home. A consultation with an elder law attorney can help you understand the benefits of attempting to qualify for Medicaid using advanced planning opportunities.

The sooner that you can plan ahead to qualify for Medicaid, the easier it will be to have options available to you when you move forward with getting a loved one in a nursing home as soon as possible. An elder law attorney can help you become more aware of your potential blind spots and help you navigate the difficulties of preparing for home care or nursing home care.       

Your first meeting with a knowledgeable estate planning lawyer lays the groundwork for all of the things you will work together towards in the future. It is important to identify an experienced estate planning lawyer who puts you at ease during this initial interview.

Many attorneys will offer a consultation to discuss some of your concerns and some of the strategies related to your estate planning. During this interview, you should not only be asking questions about your individual situation but screening the attorney to make sure that you are comfortable with working with him or her.

Complete and accurate information is vital to putting together a comprehensive estate plan so you should always be honest and upfront with your estate planning lawyer to ensure that your attorney has all the relevant information. An estate planning attorney will craft unique strategies aligned with your individual needs and therefore, it is important to verify that you have a comprehensive listing of all of your assets prior to attending this meeting.

Make sure that you have the opportunity to address your current family structure and any other unique concerns, such as your desire to pass things on to charity or to exclude certain parties from your estate planning. These steps can be instrumental in helping you to outline a full plan for protecting all of your interests and knowing what to expect down the road.

Your estate planning attorney should be well informed about relevant state and federal laws and be able to guide you through the process of selecting the tactics and strategies that are most relevant for you. It is important, however, that you have a personal connection and confidence in your estate planning lawyer’s abilities, since he or she will be playing an important role in defining your future.        

If you pass away without a will in New Jersey, your assets will be passed on to your closest relatives under laws established by New Jersey for intestate succession. Only assets that would have passed through your will are impacted by New Jersey’s intestate succession laws.

Typically, this includes only assets that you own in your own name alone. It’s important to remember that many different valuable assets do not go through your will and are, therefore, not affected by intestate succession laws.

Common examples include life insurance proceeds, property that was transferred to a living trust, payable on death bank accounts, funds in an IRA, securities held in a transfer on death account, and property on hold in tenancy by the entirety or in joint tenancy.

If you pass away with children but no spouse, your children will inherit everything. If you pass away with a spouse but no descendants or parents, the spouse inherits everything. If you pass away with a spouse and descendants from you and that spouse but that spouse also has descendants from another relationship, your spouse is entitled to inherit 25% of your intestate property.

If you pass away with a spouse and parents, the spouse is entitled to the first 25% of your intestate property so long as this is not less than $50,000 and more than $200,000, plus three-quarters of the balance. The parents would inherit any of the remaining intestate property.

It can be overwhelming to try to figure out this process of deciding who gets what on your own. It’s important to schedule a consultation with a New Jersey intestate succession lawyer to put together an appropriate plan for passing on your assets.       

The IRS has authority on the estate tax and gift tax amounts that affect individuals and families and recently announced changes to the estate tax amount for 2020.

If your estate plan requires an update or if you’d like to adjust your giving strategy in 2020, now is the right time to speak with an estate planning lawyer about those options.

The official estate tax exemption has been increased to $11.58 million per person, an increase from the 2019 number of $11.4 million. This means that as a single person, you can leave up to $11.58 million in assets behind for your loved ones without triggering an estate or gift tax.

Couples, as usual, are able to take advantage of each person’s individual amount for a combined total os $23.16 million. The annual gift amount remains the same at $15,000.

When discussing your options with your estate planning lawyer, you might decide that you can use a combination of giving over your life to maximize the gift tax and giving at death with the raised estate tax amount.

With an upcoming presidential election, possible changes to the gift tax amount are front and center for many people. Depending on the outcome to that election and changes made to the program, if they occur, you’ll want to be prepared by having a dedicated estate planning lawyer who can help you figure out how to make it all work together.

No entrepreneur wants to think about a future in which they are not involved in their business without that being their own choice. It’s smart to hope for the best and prepare for the worst but recent studies have shown that far too many entrepreneurs and business owners are hoping and preparing for the best instead.

Research from the National Association of Corporate Directors showed that two thirds of private and public companies had no formal succession plan in place for their CEOs. As a business owner you know that proper plans and structure have a key impact on your ability to thrive.

Since the future is unpredictable, the consequences of failing to institute a formal succession plan could end up harming your loved ones and your business. Three tips to make business succession planning easy include:

• Don’t procrastinate and instead think carefully about other options if it falls on you to leave the company, such as disability or divorce.
• Identify a successor for who can step in to provide continuity if you are no longer involved in the business.
• Identify the current value of your business, preferably with an objective third party so that you know where you’re working from and the different stakeholders who might be involved if you were to step away from the company.          

Sitting down with the right attorney can make a big difference in how you approach and accomplish business succession planning.

If you already created your own will without the help of an attorney, it’s still a good idea to have a lawyer review your document to ensure it’s in line with state laws. While a DIY will might seem like the easier route to go, the costs associated with making a mistake on a DIY will can follow your loved ones for many years.

Having the peace of mind of speaking with an attorney gives you the chance to correct anything inside the will that could potentially render it invalid. Furthermore, you can discuss safe places to store your will document after it’s been fully executed.

Your original will should be stored in a safe and fireproof location. Most people assume that a safety deposit box is the best place to store critical documents, including your will and even funeral or memorial instructions. The problem with this approach is if none of your loved ones know where to find this information or if they can’t get to it in time for it to be useful.

More immediate documents like your desires concerning a funeral or instructions from the plans you’ve made in advance could be stored with your estate planning lawyer or a close family member or friend. Someone else should know where to locate this information should it become necessary.

Your original will should be stored in a safe location as mentioned above, but you can keep copies elsewhere. Signed copies of the will are important in the event that the original is destroyed. It’s your job to make sure that you’ve taken as many proactive steps as possible to make it easier for your loved ones if you suddenly pass away.

While it’s a difficult subject to approach, your foresight and planning can help your loved ones in a challenging time.

Are you concerned about your assets being exposed to risks? Worried that your personal assets could be tapped through a lawsuit or through a creditor looking to close on a debt?

The best time to begin asset protection planning is long before any of these threats is on the immediate horizon. Every state has laws that protect a judgment creditor making legal efforts to collect if the debtor tries to transfer assets out of their own names in an effort to delay or block a collection attempt.

Courts, therefore, can see right through these moves and would likely classify them as “fraudulent transfers.” With asset protection planning, you must be thinking about options to shield your assets well in advance of any filed suits.

Even waiting until you think that a lawsuit might be filed is too late in most cases. While there might be a few limited steps you can take at that stage, you’re much better off by making an effort to talk with your estate planning lawyer about asset protection planning now.

The purpose of taking these steps when there’s no immediate exposure to a suit is twofold: it helps discourage people who think that you might be an easy target for a lawsuit away from doing so because they recognize that your asset protection efforts will make it harder for them to succeed and it also increases your chances of success in the event a suit is filed.

Most people who put together an asset protection plan hope that they never need to exercise its powers in court. But the peace of mind that this provides can give you confidence going forward that if a potential threat emerges that you have options available to you.

If you’re ready to talk asset protection plan specifics, our office is here to help you craft a customized plan based on your needs. Don’t wait until it’s too late- create your plan today.