About the New Tax Proposal Republicans in the U.S. House released their new tax proposal yesterday. The full text of the document is available on the web. It's 429 pages and proposes to simplify the tax code, repeal the alternate minimum tax, and reduce corporate taxes. Of course, this bill is a first draft and is in the early stages of the legislative process. It is fair to say that this version of the bill will not become law, though many of its proposals might. So, how will the new tax ...
Your Trust May Be Costing You Money
Estate planning clients often seem to hold the misconception that once they have completed their estate plan, they are done. Nothing left to do but wait until they need to use it. Of course, for some, that “use it” date does not arrive for many, many years. In the interim, everything has changed, rendering their once state-of-the-art estate plan ineffective at best or harmful at worst. If you have a trust-based estate plan that was designed prior to a major change in estate tax law in 2012, ...
Do I Still Need A Trust?
It used to be very common for estate plans to include a two-part trust scheme, often called an AB trust, designed to avoid or minimize estate taxes. In 2012, Congress finally passed “permanent” estate tax legislation, with the estate tax exemption set at $5,000,000 per person adjusted for inflation. In other words, married couples who have less than $10,000,000 in assets no longer face serious estate taxation concerns. It might be tempting to think that the once-common trust is now a relic ...
Get Your Billion Back? Reality Check.
I was struck by the H&R Block ad campaign, claiming that Americans who did their own tax paid an extra billion dollars last year, enough to put $500 on every seat in every pro football stadium in the U.S. I got to thinking about how, while that sounds like a lot, and seems to imply that people stink at doing their own taxes, the ad might actually indicate that we “self-preparers” do a decent job at it. Firstly, the ads each feature small print stating, “In a study of self-prepared ...
