Articles
Estate Planning for Business Owners
“Small businesses,” that is, those that have less than 500 employees, comprise 99.9 percent of all businesses in the United States. The owners of these businesses will, someday, exit their businesses due to retirement, incapacity or death. But most are so busy working...
Planning for Advanced Asset Protection
Asset protection is vitally important in our ever more litigious society, and more wealth planning teams are needed who understand the intricacies of this area and can collaboratively implement advanced strategies. Whether creating an entire plan for the client or...
Understanding Practice/Business Transition Planning
A large part of many financial service professionals’ practices is helping clients with business succession planning. Yet only 29% of these professionals have created a formal practice transition plan for their own businesses. In this edition of The Wealth Counselor,...
Estate Planning – A Process, Not an Event
You have signed all of your estate planning documents and, if your plan includes trusts, completed their funding. You sit back, relax, and enjoy the peace of mind that comes with completing that task. But don’t bask in that feeling for too long—estate planning is an...
Using Advanced Irrevocable Trusts for Income and Estate Tax Savings: Making 2012 Count
The next nine months are an exceptional window of opportunity for your clients to make family wealth transfers. The federal gift and estate tax exemption is $5,120,000, and both income tax rates and interest rates are at the lowest point in a generation. With federal...
An Overview of Estate Planning
Our clients expect their estate planning will cause their property to go to whom they want, the way they want, when they want and that it will minimize the impact of taxes, professional fees and court costs. They also expect their estate planning will help them keep...
Paying for College
According to the College Board, the average cost of attending an in-state four-year public college in 2011-2012 is more than $19,000 per year; for a four-year private college it is nearly $40,000 per year. Over the last decade, published tuition and fees for in-state...
An Introduction to Asset Protection Planning
Almost everyone knows someone who had a problem and lost everything. Claims can, for example, allege professional liability, responsibility for a car accident, or unpaid creditors. Whether meritorious or not, defense can be enormously costly. With our litigious...
Continuum of Care: Client Update Meetings/Financial Control System
You want a satisfying, long-term relationship with clients, meaningful recurring revenue and referrals from existing clients. Your clients want a trusted advisor relationship with you and they want coordinated estate, financial and tax planning that protects them,...
Retirement Planning: Coordinating with the Client’s Overall Planning Objectives
Coordinating retirement plans with wealth transfer planning can be challenging. This is primarily because retirement accounts are driven by income tax laws designed to encourage Americans to accumulate wealth for retirement, not for transferring wealth upon death. In...
Articles
Asset Protection Planning for the Modern Client
Only the very wealthy and those in high-risk professions need asset protection planning, right? That’s a myth. In reality, we all need asset protection. Why? Because we all can be sued and lose everything we have. A car accident, business failure, foreclosure,...
