Stites On Estates
Estate, Trust, and Tax Planning
Trust Planning for Upside Business Potential - part 3: Repeating Liquidity Events
This series on how grantor retained annuity trusts can be applied in situations with upside business potential presented an overview of how GRATs work in Part 1. Part 2 presented a case study of how...
Trust Planning for Upside Business Potential - part 2: Case Study of a Long Shot
As we saw in Part 1 of this series, a grantor retained annuity trust (or "GRAT") can be a very effective way to remove the government as a 40% silent partner in the potential upside...
Trust Planning for Upside Business Potential - part 1
The pursuit of wealth has long been part of the American Dream, and a positive feature of the current $5.34 million estate tax exemption (high by historic standards) is that entrepreneurs have more "run room"...
Reasons to Use a Life Insurance Trust, or Keep the One You Already Have
A decade ago, when the estate tax exemption was much lower, the irrevocable life insurance trust (or "ILIT") was a component of many (or even most) tax-aware estate plans.It was common for physicians, attorneys, architects...
Using Community Foundations for More Effective Charitable Giving in Your Estate Plan
Families at all levels of wealth commonly include charitable giving as a part of their estate plans. This is gratifying for the families, and absolutely essential to maintaining and building excellence in so many civic...
Using an LLC to Protect Assets for an Aging Parent
Willie Sutton is famous for allegedly answering a question about why he robbed banks with the brilliant retort: "Because that's where the money is."We can't help but think of Sutton when we consider how commonly...
Elective share statutes - hidden dangers for blended families - part 3: solutions
We hope this mini-series on the knotty estate planning issues presenting in the (fictional) later lives of the Drapers convinced you that blended families often face much greater risks to relationships, harmony, and the orderly...
Elective share statutes: hidden dangers for blended families - part 2
When a married couple doesn't have the same beneficiaries in each of their estate plans, elective share statutes make it an unstable situation, as we began to see in part 1 -- which ended with...