There are many ways of making gifts to family members and to charities and, if the gift is done right, you may be able to avoid taxes. Here are just a few ideas to discuss with your estate planning attorney: Annual exclusion gifts There is no gift tax on gifts that do not exceed a [...]
New York real estate developer Roman Blum was a Holocaust survivor, whose first wife and son died in the war. His second wife, who passed away in 1992, was infertile as a result of Joseph Mengele’s medical experiments in the concentration camps. Roman Blum died alone and childless. He also died with an estate of [...]
Warren Hillman was a federal employee who owned a Federal Employees Group Life Insurance (FEGLI) Policy with a death benefit worth over $124,000. Hillman had named his former wife, Judy Maretta, as the beneficiary on that policy. When they divorced, Hillman neglected to change that designation, even after he remarried. When Hillman died in 2008, [...]
While most people care about leaving their family in the best financial shape possible, only half of all Americans have a will. Gallup polls suggest the older a person gets the more likely they will have a will or other estate plan. In fact, more than 70% of Americans ages 50 or older have a [...]
According to a 2011 Columbia University study, 46 percent of American high school students use alcohol or drugs (approximately six million teenagers), and that almost all those suffering from substance abuse addictions started using before they reached their 18th birthday. Parents are often at a loss when dealing with a teen or adult heir who [...]
When George Steinbrenner died in July 2010, his most famous asset — the New York Yankees — was left in the care of his two sons Hal and Hank. Many Yankee fans wondered how this might affect baseball’s most successful franchise and whether or not the team would be sold. It turned out that while [...]
Mark Zuckerberg is probably the most well known of the world’s 29 billionaires under the age of 40. He and his college roommates originally developed and launched a social media company, Facebook, while they were still at Harvard. Facebook took off so quickly that Zuckerberg became a billionaire in 2007 when he was just 23 years [...]
More than three million Americans will reside in a nursing home at some point this year. Many families cannot predict when their loved one must begin to rely on outside assistance — a sudden illness can cause a previously independent senior to be in urgent need of full-time care. Families should plan for this possibility [...]
If your estate plan includes a trust, one of the most important decisions you will make is who the trustee (or trustees) should be. If the trust is one which will give the trustee(s) discretion about how much money to give the beneficiaries — and under what circumstances — then choosing the trustee may be [...]
According to a National Association of Realtors 2013 survey, vacation home sales rose to more than 550,000 last year, up about 10 percent from 2011. This means that more and more New Yorkers are likely to die owning estates that include property in another state, such as a vacation home in Maine (where fully eight [...]