Protecting Against Taxes
When the ball dropped on New Year’s, it signaled more good news for the fairly wealthy and their heirs — the exemption from federal estate taxes jumped to $5.43 million for those who die in 2015. View image | gettyimages.com That’s up from $5.34 million last year. Still, most folks don’t need to worry about […]
Long-Term Care Premium Deductible Upped
The IRS has announced that the amount taxpayers can deduct from their 2015 taxes for buying long-term care insurance has been increased. Premiums for so-called “qualified” long-term care policies are deductible as long as they, along with other unreimbursed medical expenses, including Medicare premiums, exceed 10 percent of the insured person’s adjusted gross income, or […]
The Fall of DOMA = The Rise of Confusion
The Supreme Court recently struck down the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), a 1996 federal law that defined “marriage,” for purposes of more than a thousand federal laws, as limited to a union between a man and a woman. Now, same-sex couples that are legally married will be entitled to the same treatment under […]
Incorporating Income Tax Planning Into Your Estate Plan
As estate-planning attorneys settle into the new tax rules for 2013, the focus of estate planning is beginning to take a marked shift. The $5.25 million federal estate tax exemption means that fewer people will have to plan to avoid federal estate taxes. Therefore, as a recent article explains, estate-planning attorneys are now shifting their […]
Does Portability Eliminate the Need for a Bypass Trust?
One of the many benefits of the American Taxpayer Relief Act of 2012 is that it made portability permanent. Often used as an estate-planning vehicle, portability allows married couples to share unused portions of their federal estate tax exemption. Another estate planning tool used to achieve this result is the bypass trust. A recent article […]