Taking Care of Your Business After You’re Gone Business owners are builders. They spend their lives building a business that provides goods and services to their clients and provides themselves a living. But nothing can tear down that lifetime work faster than their own death, or the death of a business partner. Often, much of [...]

Should you exploit the new $5 million lifetime gift exemption? In late 2010, Congress reunified the estate tax, gift tax and generation-skipping tax (GST), giving them all top rates of 35% with $5 million lifetime individual exemptions.1 In addition, the estate and gift tax exemptions are now portable between married couples. Upon the death of [...]

With more Americans living into fragility, POAs and other advanced directives are becoming more important. The point of the POA. A Power of Attorney is a legal instrument that delegates an individual’s legal authority to another person. If an individual is incapacitated or mentally incompetent, the POA assigns a trusted party to make decisions on [...]

What should you store in one easily accessible place? You might be surprised how many people have financial documents scattered all over the house – on the kitchen table, underneath old newspapers, in the hall closet, in the basement. If this describes your financial “filing system”, you may have a tough time keeping tabs on [...]

Killing Several Birds with One Stone In planning for your retirement, you may face several financial issues. Maybe you’d like to generate retirement income, but don’t want to pay capital gains tax on investments you’ve held for several years. Perhaps you’d like to minimize your income taxes during retirement. You also might like to reduce [...]