Latest News

It’s back-to-school time again, and when it comes to estate planning you may have homework to do. As a parent, your most critical—and often overlooked—task is to select and legally document guardians for your minor children. Guardians are people legally named to care for your children in the event of your death or incapacity.

If you haven’t done that yet, you should immediately do so using our easy-to-use (and absolutely free) website, where you can create legal documents naming the long-term guardians you’d want to care for your children if you could not. See the sidebar for the link.

Don’t think just because you’ve named godparents or have grandparents living nearby that’s enough. You must name guardians in a legal document, or risk creating conflict and a long, expensive court process for your loved ones—and this can be so easily avoided.

However, naming permanent guardians is just one step in protecting your kids. It’s equally important to have someone (plus backups) with documented authority, who can stay with your children until the long-term guardians can be located and formally named by the court, which can take months.

The last thing you want is for police to show up at your home and find your children with a caregiver, who doesn’t have documented or legal authority to stay with them and doesn’t have any idea how to contact someone with such authority. In such a case, police would have no choice but to call Child Protective Services.

This is a major hole in many parent’s estate plans, as we know you’d never want your kids in the care of strangers, even for a short time. To fix this, we’ve created a comprehensive system called the Kids Protection Plan®, which lets you name temporary guardians who have immediate documented authority to care for your children until the long-term guardians you ‘ve appointed can be notified and get to your children.

The Kids Protection Plan® also includes specific instructions that are given to everyone entrusted with your children’s care, explaining how to contact your short and long-term guardians. The plan also ensures everyone named by you has the legal documents they’d need on hand and knows exactly what to do if called upon. We even provide you with an ID card for your wallet and emergency instructions to post on your refrigerator, so the contacts and process are prominently available in case something happens to you.

“Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum.”

With the Kids Protection Plan®, you’ll name one permanent guardian and one temporary guardian, along with two or more backups, in case the primary isn’t available or cannot serve. And we instruct caregivers to NEVER CALL POLICE IF YOU CANNOT BE REACHED UNTIL ONE OF THE NAMED GUARDIANS ARRIVES AND IS PRESENT WITH YOUR CHILDREN.

Finally, if there’s anyone you’d never want raising your children, we confidentially document that in the plan, preventing them from wasting the time, energy, and assets of the people you do want caring for your children.

With us as your Personal Family Lawyer®, you have access to the entire Kids Protection Plan® system to ensure the well-being of your children no matter what. As your kids head back to school, do your homework by contacting us today.

We don’t just draft documents; we ensure you make informed and empowered decisions about life and death, for yourself and the people you love. That’s why we offer a Family Wealth Planning Session, ™ during which you will get more financially organized than you’ve ever been before, and make all the best choices for the people you love. You can begin by calling our office today to schedule a Family Wealth Planning Session and mention this article to find out how to get this $750 session at no charge. Schedule online today.

The concept of conscious uncoupling, or conscious divorce, has been around for decades in the psychotherapy community. However, the actual term “conscious uncoupling” was thrust into the mainstream lexicon in 2014, when Gwyneth Paltrow used it to publicly announce that she and husband Chris Martin were separating. Today, we’ll discuss the 3 key benefits of conscious uncoupling.

Since then, the term has been used extensively to describe what was previously called “amicable divorce” or “uncontested divorce.” In 2016, relationship expert Katherine Woodward Thomas wrote the book Conscious Uncoupling, and she now offers a five-week program of therapy designed to help individuals make a more healthy transition from marriage to singlehood.

While there’s no precise definition of conscious uncoupling, according to Thomas, it basically involves reframing divorce from a traumatic experience into one that focuses on the positive opportunities a split offers for personal growth and spiritual development. The goal is to end the relationship in a truly cooperative and respectful manner, which can have tremendous benefits for both the couple and their children.

It’s important to note that conscious uncoupling has no legal effect on the marriage. Rather, it’s about maintaining a positive mindset that seeks to mitigate the often terrible effects divorce can have on our emotions, family, and finances.

In order to actually terminate the marriage and resolve all of the legal consequences that this entails, couples must still undergo a divorce. This is one reason we often use the term “conscious divorce,” instead of conscious uncoupling.

Based on numerous reports from therapists and couples, we’ve laid out the primary benefits conscious divorce offers those seeking a more compassionate and mindful way to end their relationship:

Now that same-gender couples can legally marry in all 50 states, more Americans than ever before are enjoying the rights and benefits that come with marriage. Estate planning, in particular, is one arena where these new rights and benefits are readily apparent.

With marriage equality, same-gender couples no longer have to pay exorbitant amounts of money for creative estate-planning work-arounds just to achieve similar protections offered to opposite-gender couples. Yet same-gender couples continue to face unique planning challenges.

Because you may have family members who remain opposed to the validity of your marriage, same-gender couples’ estate plans are often more vulnerable to dispute and even sabotage by unsupportive relatives. This could mean that family members are more likely to contest your wishes, or it might entail custody battles over non-biological children in the event of the biological parent’s death.

Unsupportive family members may even try to block the ability of your spouse to make medical decisions on your behalf should you become incapacitated by accident or illness.

While the planning vehicles available to same-gender and opposite-gender married couples are generally the same, there are a few unique considerations those in same-gender marriages ought to be aware of. Here are three of the most important things to keep in mind.

For a number of reasons, putting a trust in place—rather than relying solely on will—is a good planning strategy for nearly everyone. Upon the death of one spouse, a will is required to go through the often long, costly, and conflict-ridden court process. However, assets passed through a trust pass directly to the named beneficiaries without the need for probate.

If your relationship is not supported by one or both families, avoiding probate is especially important. If a family member doesn’t support same-gender marriage, they’re more likely to contest your will during, especially if that family member would’ve received a substantially larger inheritance in a previous will prepared before the marriage.

If your will is successfully contested, this could prevent your surviving spouse from receiving assets you left them in your will. And even if the contest ultimately fails, the process of defending the will’s validity in court can be extremely time-consuming, costly, and emotionally draining for your surviving spouse.

What’s more, a trust works in cases of both your death and incapacity, while a will only goes into effect upon death. Given these reasons, it’s best for those in same-gender marriages to create both a will and trust.

Estate planning is not just about planning for your death; it’s also about planning for your potential incapacity. Should you be incapacitated by illness or injury, it’s not guaranteed that your spouse would have the ultimate legal authority to make key decisions about your medical treatment and finances.

Absent a plan for incapacity, it’s left to the court to appoint the person who will make these decisions for you. Though spouses are typically given priority, this isn’t always the case, especially if unsupportive family members challenge the issue in court. To ensure your spouse has the authority to make decisions for you, you must grant him or her medical power of attorney and financial power of attorney.

Medical power of attorney gives your spouse the authority to make health-care decisions for you if you’re incapacitated and unable to do so yourself. By the same token, financial power of attorney gives your spouse the authority to manage your financial affairs. And be sure to also create a living will, so that your spouse will know exactly how you want your medical care managed in the event of your incapacity.

While the biological parent of a child in a same-gender marriage is of course automatically granted parental rights, the non-biological spouse/parent still faces a number of legal complications. Because the Supreme Court has yet to rule on the parental rights of non-biological spouses/parents in a same-gender marriage, there is a tangled, often-contradictory, web of state laws governing such rights.

To ensure the full rights of a non-biological parent, many legal experts advise same-gender couples to undergo second-parent adoption. But in many states, it can be extremely difficult for same-gender couples to adopt—some states even permit employees of state-licensed adoption agencies to refuse to grant an adoption if doing so violates their religious beliefs.

However, using a variety of unique planning strategies, we can provide non-biological, same-gender parents with nearly all parental rights without going through adoption. Using our Kids Protection Plan®, couples can name the non-biological parent as the child’s legal guardian, both for the short-term and the long-term, while confidentially excluding anyone the biological parent thinks may challenge their wishes.

In this way, if the biological parent becomes incapacitated or dies, his or her wishes are clearly stated, so the court can do what the parent would’ve wanted and keep the child in the non-biological parent’s care.

Beyond that, there are several other planning tools we can use to offer the non-biological parent additional rights. One such tool is a co-parenting agreement. This is a legally binding arrangement that stipulates exactly how the child will be raised, what responsibility each spouse has toward the child, and what kind of rights would exist if the couple splits or goes through a divorce.

In light of these issues, it’s crucial that married, same-gender couples, especially those with children, always work with experienced planning professionals and avoid using generic online documents at all costs. We have extensive experience creating plans specifically designed to prevent your plan from being challenged in court by family members who disagree with your relationship.

What’s more, our specialized planning services can help ensure that non-biological parents in same-gender marriages have as many parental rights as possible, without resorting to second-parent adoption.

We offer a complete spectrum of legal services for business owners and can help you make the wisest choices on how to deal with your business throughout life and in the event of your death. We also offer you a LIFT Your Life And Business Planning Session, which includes a review of all the legal, insurance, financial, and tax systems you need for your business. Schedule online today.

On January 1, 2020, the Setting Every Community Up for Retirement Enhancement Act (SECURE Act) went into effect, and it represents the most significant retirement-planning legislation in decades.

Indeed, the changes ushered in by the SECURE Act have dramatic implications for both your retirement and estate planning strategies—and not all of them are positive. While the law includes a number of taxpayer-friendly measures to boost your ability to save for retirement, it also contains provisions that could have disastrous effects on planning strategies families have used for years to protect and pass on assets contained in retirement accounts.

Given this, if you hold assets in a retirement account you need  to review your financial plan and estate plan as soon as possible. To help you with this process, here we’ll cover three of the SECURE Act’s biggest changes and how they stand to affect your retirement account both during your lifetime and after your death. Next week, we’ll look more deeply into a couple of additional strategies you may want to consider.

Prior to the SECURE Act, the law required you to start making withdrawals from your retirement account at age 70 ½. But for people who haven’t reached 70 ½ by the end of 2019, the SECURE Act pushes back the RMD start date until age 72.

Under previous law, those who continued working could not contribute to a traditional IRA once they reached 70 ½. Starting in 2020, the SECURE Act removed that cap, so you can continue making contributions to your IRA for as long as you and/or your spouse are still working.

These two changes are positive because with our increased life spans people are now staying in the workforce longer than ever before, and the new rules allow you to continue contributing to your retirement accounts and accumulating tax-free growth for as long as possible.

However, to offset the tax revenue lost due to these beneficial changes, as you’ll see below, the SECURE Act also includes some less-favorable changes to the distribution requirements for retirement accounts after your death.

The part of the SECURE Act that’s likely to have the most significant impact on your heirs is a provision that makes significant changes to distribution requirements for inherited retirement accounts, and effectively ends the so-called “stretch IRA.”

Under prior law, beneficiaries of your retirement account could choose to stretch out distributions—and, therefore, the income taxes owed on those distributions—over their own life expectancy. For example, an 18-year old beneficiary expected to live an additional 65 years could inherit an IRA and stretch out the distributions for 65 years, paying income tax on just a small amount of their inheritance every year. And in that case, the income tax law would encourage the child to not withdraw and spend the inherited assets all at once.

Under the SECURE Act, however, most designated beneficiaries will now be required to withdraw all the assets from the inherited account—and pay income taxes on them—within 10 years of the account owner’s death. Those who fail to withdraw funds within the 10-year window face a 50% tax penalty on the assets remaining in the account.

The law does offer exemptions to the mandatory 10-year withdrawal rule for certain beneficiaries, known as eligible designated beneficiaries (EDB):

1. A surviving spouse named as an outright beneficiary of a retirement plan still has the option of rolling over the benefits to his or her own IRA or taking distributions based on his or her own life expectancy.
2. Beneficiaries who are less than 10 years younger than you can still take distributions based on their own life expectancy.
3. Your minor children, who have not reached the “age of majority” don’t have to deplete the account until 10 years after they come of age.  Yet that still would be a much shorter “stretch” than previously available.
4. Disabled individuals and chronically ill individuals can take distributions based on their life expectancy.

Apart from these exceptions, opportunities for stretching an IRA over an extended period of time are no longer available. This means if you want the people who will inherit your retirement account after your death to benefit from long-term income tax deferral—as well as asset protection from lawsuits, creditors, or divorce—you must meet with us now to rework your plan.

Depending on the value of your retirement account, you may have already addressed the distribution of its assets using a “conduit” provision in your will, revocable trust, or standalone retirement trust. Prior to the SECURE Act, a trustee of a trust that included a conduit provision would only distribute the required minimum distributions (RMD) to trust beneficiaries each year.

This allowed the beneficiary to take advantage of the continued “stretch” based on their age and life expectancy. In this way, the conduit trust protected the account balance and only exposed the much smaller RMD amounts to creditors and divorcing spouses.

Under the SECURE Act, however, the 10-year limit for taking distributions will lead to the acceleration of income tax due, possibly bumping your beneficiaries into a higher income tax bracket. This potentially hefty tax burden would likely result in your beneficiary receiving significantly less funds from the retirement account than you had initially planned on.

What’s more, because the SECURE Act requires all funds in your retirement account to be withdrawn within 10 years after your death, a conduit trust would be required to distribute all of its assets outright to the beneficiary within this shortened period. This means you would also lose any long-term asset protection you may have built into your plan.

Given the SECURE Act’s new rules, you may want to consider amending your trust to shift it from a “conduit trust” to become an  “accumulation trust.” Such a trust structure can’t extend the tax benefits any longer than 10 years, but it can ensure the assets are protected from your beneficiary’s future risky activities and/or a divorce.

One important thing to note: Retained distributions from a traditional IRA distributing to an accumulation trust would be exposed to compressed income tax rates that apply to trusts. Currently, trusts reach the maximum 37% tax bracket with undistributed taxable income of $12,950. Facing such a tax hit, if you opt for this solution, your plan should include additional strategies to address the tax obligation. We’ll share some options for this in next week’s article.

We can update your plan to address all of the potential ramifications the SECURE Act might have on the distribution of your retirement account’s assets to your loved ones following your death. But to do that, we need to meet with you to consider your family dynamic and all of your assets, so we can thoroughly assess the big-picture impact the SECURE Act stands to have on your estate.

This is exactly what we do during our Family Wealth Planning Session, a two-hour, working meeting that educates and empowers you to know you’ve done the right thing for the people you love no matter what happens to you. Whether you’ve yet to create a plan or already have one created another lawyer, schedule an appointment today.

Next week in the second part of this series, we’ll cover some of the potential ramifications the SECURE Act stands to have on your financial-planning strategies and how you can make the most of the new legal landscape.

Proper estate planning can keep your family out of conflict, out of court, and out of the public eye. If you’re ready to create a comprehensive estate plan, contact us to schedule your Family Wealth Planning Session. Even if you already have a plan in place, we will review it and help you bring it up to date to avoid heartache for your family. Schedule online today.

Imagine this… You are an elderly grandparent who lives alone.

You get a call in the middle of the night from your college-aged granddaughter. She’s frantic and crying, telling you she was mistakenly arrested while vacationing in Cancun. 

She says she needs you to pay her $1,800 bond, or she’ll be transferred to a dangerous Mexican prison. The Mexican police told her she only has a few hours before she’s transferred, so she needs you to wire the money immediately. 

She’s petrified about her parents finding out she was arrested and begs you not to tell them. Because she only has a couple of minutes to use the police station phone, the call ends abruptly before you can get any further details.

What do you do?

If you’re like the thousands of others who’ve gotten just such a call, you’d probably wire the money in a heartbeat. It is your grandchild’s life after all. However, just like the others, you’d soon find out that your granddaughter hasn’t been arrested and was never in Mexico.

Known as the Grandparent Scam, this con has been around for years, and while it may seem far fetched, it has tricked many caring seniors. And in recent months, there has been an uptick in the number of people falling prey to the deception.

The details can vary, but the scam typically works like this:

1) You get a call from someone pretending to be your grandchild. The “grandchild” explains he or she is in trouble and needs money immediately. They might be in jail and need bond or be stranded in a foreign country and need money to get out.

2) The caller asks you to wire money to a specific location or give it to a third party, usually someone posing as a lawyer or police officer.

3) The “grandchild” will often plead with you not to tell their parents they’re in trouble.

4) Once you send the money, the caller breaks off all contact, making it impossible to recover your funds.

While just about anyone can fall for such scams, the elderly are the ones targeted most often. This is due to the fact that seniors are frequently lonely and eager to hear from family. And whether it’s because their hearing is failing or because they haven’t seen their family members in awhile, they’re more likely to not recognize voices.

Due to their advanced age, seniors are also less likely to think clearly in a crisis, making them more susceptible to fear and panic. Finally, the elderly are less familiar with technology and social media, so they don’t realize how easy it is to access enough of someone’s personal details to make the scenario seem realistic.

In most cases, the best course of action is to simply hang up and contact the authorities. However, if the caller really does sound like the family member they claim to be, here are some steps you can take to help verify the situation is legitimate:

1) Don’t panic. It’s far easier to be deceived if you’re nervous or scared.

2) Be wary of calls from unknown or blocked numbers. Ask to call them back on the person’s own phone, and never accept requests sent solely by email or text.

3) Verify the caller’s identity by asking them questions only the actual person would know the answer to, such as the name of their first pet.

4) Beware of urgent demands that money be sent immediately. Reputable sources don’t try to pressure you into making split-second financial decisions.

5) Call other family and friends to verify where the person is. A reputable source will respect your caution and give you the opportunity to verify the facts.

6) Requests for money to be wired are often scams, as it’s nearly impossible to get your money back in cases of fraud. Request a more secure transaction method, such as through a bank or PayPal. Legitimate sources are likely to offer multiple payment options.

Please share this article with any seniors in your life. There are countless other scams out there that work in much the same way, so even if it’s not this particular con, by becoming aware how these deceptions work, they’ll be much less likely to fall for them.

Of course, scams and cons are just one threat to seniors’ financial security. Without comprehensive estate planning, there are numerous other ways your family’s wealth and assets can be squandered or lost which have nothing to do with fraud.

Consult with us to put planning strategies in place to safeguard your family’s finances and other assets, both tangible and intangible.

Proper estate planning can keep your family out of conflict, out of court, and out of the public eye. If you’re ready to create a comprehensive estate plan, contact us to schedule your Family Wealth Planning Session. Even if you already have a plan in place, we will review it and help you bring it up to date to avoid heartache for your family. Schedule online today.