Estate Planning Red Flag -You Didn’t Place Restrictions on your Charitable Gifts
Charitable giving allows you to support causes you care about while potentially reducing your estate tax burden. However, making unrestricted gifts to charity without careful estate planning can create unintended consequences that may diminish both your benefits and the long-term impact of the gifts.
An unrestricted gift gives a...
Estate Planning Red Flag – You Own Property Jointly with your Child and Haven’t Planned Properly
There are certain estate planning strategies that, on the surface, may sound appealing. This includes owning property jointly with a child or other family member. However, in practice, these techniques can result in unwelcome outcomes that outweigh any potential benefits.
To be clear, owning an asset with your child...
What’s my art collection worth?
Proper estate planning is important when accounting for works of art
If you possess paintings, sculptures and other pieces of art, they may represent a significant portion of your estate. Thus, these assets must be properly accounted for in your estate plan.
In your planning, you’ll...
Now’s the time to review your GST tax exposure
Absent congressional action this year, the federal gift and estate exemption and the generation-skipping transfer (GST) tax exemption (currently $13.99 million) are scheduled to return to their pre-2018 levels of $5 million (around $7 million when adjusted for inflation) beginning in 2026. So, it’s a good idea to consider strategies for taking...
Estate Planning Red Flag
You don’t understand the rules when splitting gifts with your spouse
Here’s a quick estate planning tip: one of the easiest ways to reduce the size of your taxable estate is to take advantage of your gift tax exclusion. For 2025, you can transfer up to $19,000 per recipient...
Revisit your buy-sell agreement in light of the U.S. Supreme Court’s Connelly decision
Buy-sell agreements are essential estate and succession planning tools for many family businesses and other closely held companies. These agreements, among other things, ensure that the business stays within the family or other ownership group.
Typically, this is accomplished by providing that if an owner dies or leaves the...
What’s my art collection worth?
Proper estate planning is important when accounting for works of art
If you possess paintings, sculptures and other pieces of art, they may represent a significant portion of your estate. Thus, these assets must be properly accounted for in your estate plan.
In your planning, you’ll...
Have you properly substantiated your charitable gifts?
Are you charitably inclined? If so, and you itemize deductions, you may be entitled to deduct your charitable donations. The key word here is “may” because there are certain requirements and limitations your donations must meet. One such requirement is the need to substantiate charitable gifts with proper documentation.