How to Help Your Clients’ Adult Children

Reposted from RegisteredRep.com | By Kevin McKinley Giving the young adults in your clients’ families a little time and attention can be beneficial for everyone involved. Most advisors are most interested in working with individuals who have the most money to manage. This usually means those who are about to retire or have just done so. But many of these clients have one thing on their minds that may be even more important and worrisome to them than their money: their fully-grown (if not yet fully-matured) children. Helping the next generation get off on the right financial foot could be…

Tax Expert Marty Shenkman: Two Tax Mistakes to Avoid With Clients in 2012

Despite the uncertainty of where estate, income and capital gains rates will be this year, you still need to plan. Reposted from AdvisorOne.com | By Marlene Y. Satter, AdvisorOne Martin Shenkman of Shenkman Law in Paramus, N.J. doesn’t hesitate to tell it like it is about tax planning in 2012: “This is not a normal year,” he says. However, that’s no excuse for what he sees as two huge mistakes that advisors and their clients often make as they quiver with uncertainty over what Congress may or may not do this year regarding taxes. Those two mistakes? Acting like an…

Senate Highway Bill S.2132 Brings Back Mandated 5-Year Rule for Payout of Inherited IRAs

A special thanks to Robert Keebler of Keebler & Associates, LLP for bringing to our attention the Senate Highway Bill S.2132, which brings back the mandated 5-year rule for Inherited IRAs (with some exceptions). This obviously has a lot of estate planning professionals on edge to see what’s going to happen with respect to retirement benefit planning for clients this year and beyond. The entire Bill can be found on the Library of Congress’ website. To view S.2132, click here. Robert Keebler has a phone call into Senator Baucus’ office to confirm and will be posting more updates in the…

February 29th: Fun Facts About Leap Day

Today is February 29th, 2012. LEAP DAY! We thought that it’d be fun to share some fun facts about Leap Day with all of you, thanks to this entry on Yahoo! Work + Money. Enjoy! 2012 is a leap year, meaning that February, the shortest month, has an extra day, bringing the year to 366 days. This notable event comes only every four years. Which means you have an extra 24 hours. So what will you do with yourself? How about heading to Disneyland for 24 hours straight, catching a movie, or spending the day skiing? Lookups on the Web…

Leimberg Information Services: 60-Second Planner on President Obama’s Estate & Income Tax Proposal

Reproduced with Permission by and Courtesy of Leimberg Information Services, Inc. (LISI). For information about how to subscribe to LISI, click here. As mentioned previously by Robert S. Keebler in a previous blog entry, President Obama’s Fiscal Year 2013 budget was released on February 13th. Follow this link to get a full copy of the 2013 Budget. The Treasury’s Green Book containing general explanations of the Administration’s revenue proposals can be found here. We now wanted to share with you two Leimberg Information Services, Inc. 60-Second Planner podcasts in response to this budget. One podcast deals with the estate and…

How to Thrive in the Under $5 Million Estate Market

By Philip J. Kavesh, J.D., LL.M. (Tax), CFP®, ChFC, California State Bar Certified Specialist in Estate Planning, Tax and Probate Law I and many practitioners have over the years built successful practices on what I call the “middle market”, that is, estates valued anywhere from $500,000 to $5 million. This level of estate planning practice faces a number of challenges today unlike any we have had in the past. Our services have become commoditized into mass produced documents, with increasing low-priced competition from the internet, do-it-yourself packages, non-attorney paralegals and bargain-priced attorneys. Plus, with the new $5.12 million Federal Estate…

IRS Extends Deadline to Make Portability Election

On February 17th, the IRS released an important Notice allowing an extension to make a portability election for certain qualifying estates. An executor of a qualifying estate that wants to obtain the extension granted by this notice must file the application for a six month extension no later than 15 months after the decedent’s date of death. With the extension granted by this notice, the Form 706 of a qualifying estate will be due 15 months after the decedent’s date of death. The first of these extensions (and underlying Form 706) will be due April 2nd. Estates qualifying for this…

U.S. Treasury Announces President Obama’s 2013 Budget and Proposed Estate Tax Law Changes

A special thank you to Robert Keebler of Keebler & Associates, LLP for the heads up that the U.S Treasury just released its FY2013 Greenbook, which provides an explanation of the Administration’s revenue proposals for Fiscal Year 2013. The Administration’s FY2013 budget proposes tax policy to boost growth, create jobs and improve opportunity for the middle class. In particular, as estate planning professionals, we are all extremely interested to see what is going to happen with the current Federal Estate Tax Exemption Amount, which is set to revert back to $1 million in 2013. According to this bill, the estate…

The eBoot Camp’s Valentine’s Day Gifts to You

Phil Kavesh here to share with you a very special Valentine’s Day Gift that I am passing along from a dear friend of mine. A little over a year ago, I had the fortunate opportunity to pick up a copy of The eBoot Camp’s President, Corey Perlman’s, book entitled, The eBoot Camp: Proven Internet Marketing Techniques to Grow Your Business. Some of my favorite marketing minds and authors had endorsed the book for small businesses and as a self-proclaimed internet dinosaur, it was not only an easy read, but I could tell that Corey knew what he was talking about….

Practical Planner: Checklist: More Heckerling Nuggets (Volume 7, Issue 1)

Martin “Marty” Shenkman, Esq., CPA, MBA is an estate planning attorney and Certified Public Accountant who authors a number of publications each month, including his monthly e-mail newsletter, “Practical Planner“. Below is the second installment from Marty’s January/February 2012 newsletter. To be added to Marty’s monthly e-mail distribution list, e-mail newsletter@shenkmanlaw.com. √ Your Tax Reimbursement Clauses Might be Dangerous: Some grantor trusts (income taxed to you) include a provision that permit the trustee of a trust you create to reimburse you for taxes you pay on trust income. If reimbursement is mandatory, Go To Tax Jail, Do Not Pass Go….