Parenting is a tough job, with an ongoing list of things to do and never enough time in which to do them.  The school days are laden with frantic employment; lunches and homework, field trips and afterschool activities.  Most parents barely have a chance to catch their breath until they fall into bed at the end of the day.  Who has time to think about estate planning?

Once the summer months roll around the temptation to relax into a cool pool with a tall iced-tea can be overwhelming, especially when you know that busy family vacation is coming up soon.

Tempting as it may be to put off your estate planning for just one more week or month, the best thing you can do—for yourself and for your family—is to dig in and call your attorney right now.  The high-travel time of summer is full of potential danger, and you’ll feel much more relaxed on your family vacation if you know you’ve taken steps to provide for your children with a trust and nomination of guardians if something happens to you.

Even putting aside potential travel dangers, summer is a busy time in hospitals right here at home, with heat stroke, poisonous animal bites or insect stings, not to mention bone-breaks and muscle strains.  Any hospital visit will be made much smoother if you have an updated Health Care Directive and HIPAA in place.

Take advantage of these slower days of summer to protect your family and give yourself peace of mind.  All of your summer activities will be more enjoyable when you know you have a safety net in place for your spouse and children should something happen to you.  If you don’t act now those busy autumn school days are just around the corner, waiting to fill your leisure hours with frantic activities once more.

There are some people who might question the patriotism of those who would try to arrange their affairs to pay a lower amount of taxes. But how much truth is there in that?

Is it unpatriotic to want to work within the limits of the law to reduce the amount of taxes you pay?

Everyone will have their own opinion about this, and we welcome you to join the conversation by leaving a comment.  To begin the discussion we give you the opinions of two distinguished American jurists:

“Anyone may arrange his affairs so that his taxes shall be as low as possible; he is not bound to choose that pattern which best pays the treasury. There is not even a patriotic duty to increase one’s taxes. Over and over again the Courts have said that there is nothing sinister in so arranging affairs as to keep taxes as low as possible. Everyone does it, rich and poor alike and all do right, for nobody owes any public duty to pay more than the law demands: Taxes are enforced exactions, not voluntary contributions. To demand more in the name of morals is mere cant. “

— Honorable Learned Hand, U.S. Appeals Court Judge, Helvering v. Gregory, 69 F.2d 809 (1934).

“I live in Alexandria, Virginia. Near the Supreme Court chamber is a toll bridge across the Potomac. When in a rush I pay the dollar toll and get home early. However, I usually drive a free bridge outside the down- town section of the city, and cross the Potomac on a free bridge. The bridge was placed outside the downtown Washington D.C. area to serve a useful social service: getting drivers to drive the extra mile to help alleviate congestion during rush hour. If I went over the toll bridge and through the barrier without paying the toll, I would be committing tax evasion. If, however, I drive the extra mile and drive outside the city of Washington, I am using a legitimate, logical and suitable method of tax avoidance, and I am performing a useful social service by doing so. For my tax evasion, I should be punished. For my tax avoidance, I should be commended. The tragedy of life today is that so few people know that the free bridge even exists.”

— U.S. Supreme Court Justice Louis D. Brandeis

How is your business doing this summer?

The warm months from June to August can be an excruciatingly slow period for some small businesses and their owners.  They experience a slow summer slump while their client base goes off on vacation or relaxes at the beach.  But rather than viewing this time with dread, why not look at the summer slump as an opportunity?  This slow period can be a great time to delve into the inner workings of your business and make improvements, as this article by Colleen LeBaise on Smart Money’s Small Business site recommends.

Having just passed the second quarter milestone, summer is the perfect time for business owners to execute their midyear check-ups; reviewing performance and finances from the first half of the year and planning ahead for the next half.  DeBaise’s article has further suggestions for turning these idle summer days into productive powerhouse moments, including networking with professionals and creating a disaster plan.

During this time when you are performing your reviews and making plans for the future is a perfect time to touch base with your estate planning attorney, who can help you plan not only for any possible natural disasters, but for legal, financial, and personnel disasters as well.  And while you’re there, your estate planning attorney is a great person to ask about networking opportunities or to help you review your business plan.

Take advantage of these slow summer months to get done all those things you only have time to think about during the busy portion of the year.  Before you know it business will be heating up as the weather cools down in fall, and then the holidays will be upon us.  Give yourself a head start in these long dog days of summer.

Creating an estate plan is a very personal matter, and is usually done privately, with your attorney and with your partner, if you have one.  However, there are some circumstances under which estate planning should be a family affair—perhaps even a multigenerational one.

Sean Condon writes about when it might be appropriate to include the whole family in the estate planning process in his article Estate Planning Can Be A Multigenerational Matter.  Condon’s article mentions specific situations in which families would want to consider planning as a whole unit, including the following:

Planning for succession within a family business.

When multiple generations of families own property together.

If the family is responsible for significant debt.

If a family has a history of supporting certain charitable foundations and desires to continue doing so.

To provide for family members who live out of the country.

To make provisions for a non-traditional family situation, such as unmarried partners.

In many situations, you won’t have to choose between an estate plan that is private and one for your extended family.  There are many ways to create individual estate plans for each nuclear family while still respecting and arranging for matters that affect the extended family as a whole.  Of course, the process is easier if each nuclear family is able to work with the same attorney, but it is certainly not necessary as long as each attorney and family is willing to communicate and act together.

If you aren’t sure if you should plan privately for your family or include your whole multigenerational unit in the process, give our office a call.  We can help you look down the road ahead and create a plan of action that will make every member of your family feel secure.

Celebrity divorces can hardly be considered news anymore, they happen so often, but the recently finalized divorce between Bill Murray and ex-wife Jennifer Butler Murray is news because of something they did before the wedding:  They signed a prenuptial agreement.

And it worked.  At least it seems to have worked so far according to the Associated Press.

Preventing painful, drawn out court battles and protecting your individual property is exactly what a prenuptial agreement is designed to do.  And prenups are not just for celebrities or millionaires anymore.  If you have property, or a business, or even a burgeoning career, a prenuptial agreement is worth looking into.

Are you planning to pass an inheritance on to your children? Ron Lieber, author of this article in the New York Times, writes that leaving a financial legacy may be more difficult than you think. “With each passing year” Lieber writes, “the pressures on the nest eggs of older people will only grow.”

Lieber outlines in his article 8 possible reasons you may not end up leaving the inheritance your children will expect, but the last one is the most interesting; “the transfer of wealth will increasingly happen while the older generations are still alive.” This is because more and more people are realizing the benefits of giving tax free gifts during their lifetimes, instead of waiting to leave an inheritance.

Giving a gift during your lifetime that is within the annual exclusion amount (currently $12,000 per gift) means that you can not only have the satisfaction of seeing the recipient enjoy the gift during your lifetime, you also have the added benefit of reducing your taxable estate.

And just because you decide to give your financial gifts before your death doesn’t mean you have to give up the protection of giving your gift in trust. A trust can be created and used during your lifetime; a fact which can be especially helpful if one of your beneficiaries has special needs.

Most estate planning attorneys will tell you that if you want to spend your last dime on the day you die—so much the better! But it shouldn’t stop you from thinking about the future right now. Whether you plan to leave gifts to your children and grandchildren before or after your death, let someone in the know help you find the most efficient way to leave the legacy you want.

Estate planning attorneys get asked a lot of questions about how to protect every different kind of family and situation, but the questions that are asked the most tend to be about trusts.  The topic comes up so often, in fact, that it is useful to review basic trust information occasionally, as author John Ventura does so well in this interview for American Public Media’s radio show Marketplace.

Trusts are so useful and versatile that they serve as the backbone of just about every different kind of estate plan; from the plan created by an elderly grandparent, to the one executed by the new young couple.  This isn’t to say that each trust is the same for every estate plan—far from it!  As John Ventura says in his interview, “every person’s life is different, every person’s estate, property, the heirs that they want to benefit are all different, so the living trust has to be customized to the individual.”

This is the beauty of trusts, they are indeed highly customizable.  Ventura describes two different kinds of trusts in his interview; a living trust and a testamentary trust; and touches briefly on a special needs trust, which allows you to pass money to a disabled beneficiary without disrupting that beneficiary’s public benefits.  But trusts provide far more options than those three mentioned above.  Other options include irrevocable trusts, retirement trusts, education trusts, gifting trusts, and many more . . . even pet trusts!

If you are considering creating a will or estate plan, or updating the one you already have, the best thing you can do is to know your options.  Contact our office for more information about trusts, and which of the many trust options may be the right tool to protect your family.

If you’re wondering exactly how much you’ll have to put in the bank to live comfortably when you retire, you’re not alone.  But it just got a little bit easier.  You now have the recently updated retirement calculator and guide, “Taking the Mystery Out of Retirement Planning”, provided by Uncle Sam himself, to help you figure it all out.  And according to The Wall Street Journal, it’s “one of the best resources available.”

We would all like to have the security of knowing that we have enough to live on when we retire.  Unfortunately, we have no crystal ball that can tell us with absolute certainty how much will be “enough”.  Even the above-mentioned guide from the Employee Benefits Security Administration—although updated, improved, and easy to understand—can only give you a best guess.

The best way to ensure you have enough on which to retire is simply to stay informed and be prepared.  And this is where your advisors can help.

Your financial planner and estate planning attorney work hand in hand to make sure you can retire in comfort.  Your financial planner can help you navigate the murky waters of investing, answering questions such as “How much should I be investing?  Where?  For how long?”  Your estate planning attorney can give you the tools to protect those investments for yourself, your spouse, and your children or grandchildren.

Don’t let fear or lack of education paralyze you.  Get the help and advice you need to take your future into your own hands.

If you have an elderly parent or grandparent, you know how much time and research goes into finding the right care, the right doctor, or the right living situation for them.  Caring for the aging population is a growing industry, with new services and options almost every day. Trying to keep up with it can feel close to impossible.

Enter the new professional: Geriatric care managers.  This “new” profession is poised to play a significant role in the near future.  This article in the New York Times describes geriatric care managers as “guides through the fragmented care landscape, connecting clients with local services, assisted-living facilities and a wide network of paid caregivers, elder law attorneys and financial advisers. They help families find living options, assess the abilities of older people, write care plans and sometimes hire and supervise home help”.

In actuality, geriatric care managers have existed in the United States for about 20 years, but the profession is only now starting to boom.  And with a description like the one above, it’s easy to see why.

The aging process in the United States is evolving more quickly than most people thought possible.  And more and more baby-boomers, who have yet to reach the age where they need elder care, are planning for their own sunset years rather than leaving it in the hands of their children.  Geriatric care managers are likely to become an invaluable resource for the “sandwich generation” AND elderly individuals themselves.

If you are caring for an aging relative, or trying to plan for your own future, consider contacting a geriatric care manager in your area through The National Association of Professional Geriatric Care Managers.

You’ve met with an attorney, you’ve signed a trust, and you’ve brought copies of it home with you in a nice-looking binder . . . Now what?  Are you done?

Not quite.

The very last step of creating an estate plan is to fund your trust.  Funding is the process of putting all of your property into the trust.  If you think of your trust as a lock-box, protecting its contents from the probate process and keeping them private; then funding is how you fill that box.  Without funding, your trust is just an empty box, and doesn’t provide much protection at all.

So what are the things you’ll want to put into that trust lock-box? The easy answer is EVERYTHING.  Start by asking your attorney to create a deed to help you put your home into your trust.  For most people, their home is their greatest asset, and the one that is most important to put into that protective box.

The next step is to go to your bank and investment advisor and put your bank accounts and stocks or investments, and any other immediate assets into the name of your trust.  To do this you will need your Certification of Trust, which is a short document proving the existence of your trust.

The third step is to look at all of your tax-deferred assets such as retirement accounts, 401(k) accounts, or life insurance policies.  These tax-deferred assets cannot be owned by the trust, but to ensure that the proceeds of these assets are distributed according to your wishes you will need to make your trust the primary beneficiary of the accounts or policies.  By doing this you are arranging to funnel the proceeds of these assets into the protective lock-box when the time comes.

Your last step is to execute a comprehensive transfer document, a simple document stating your desire to put all small or tangible property such as furniture, artwork, antiques, etc., into that lock-box, and be considered trust property, rather than subject to probate.

Of course every estate will have its idiosyncrasies, and you’ll want to contact your attorney for a comprehensive list of assets to fund, or if you run into any roadblocks. Once you’ve tucked all your property nicely away in that protective box you can finally breathe that final sigh of relief.