Insurance Archive
Life Insurance Product Suitability, Revisited
In a January 2010 Trusts & Estates article entitled The Estate Planner's Guide to Product Suitability,1 I suggested that it's imperative to have a process...
Substituting a Life Insurance Policy in an Irrevocable Trust
On Dec. 1, 2011, the Internal Revenue Service issued Revenue Ruling 2011-28,1 which finally clarified that a life insurance policy in an irrevocable trust...
Managing Trust-Owned Life Insurance
In Part 1 of this article, published in the December 2011 issue of Trusts & Estates, I examined a lawyer's duty of care to trust beneficiaries and the...
A Look Back at Life Insurance
Life insurance is a confusing topic in and of itself. Start a conversation about life insurance at your next cocktail party and see what happens. The...
The New Investment Alternative
Long-term care (LTC) insurance can be an attractive investment alternative for high-net-worth individuals for two reasons....
State Premium Tax Planning
The Tax Relief, Unemployment Insurance Reauthorization and Job Creation Act of 2010 (2010 Tax Act) brought about an increase in the gift, estate and generation-skipping...
An Ounce of Prevention
A great deal has been written in the last decade about trust-owned life insurance (TOLI) and the responsibilities and obligations of trustees/fiduciaries...
Insurance Policy Management
Among other perplexing issues facing clients these days is what to do with life insurance policies that are calling out for attention, sometimes very...
Life Insurance Planning After the 2010 Tax Act
The Dec. 17, 2010 enactment of the Tax Relief, Unemployment Insurance Reauthorization and Job Creation Act of 2010 (2010 Tax Act) added the concept of...
Life Insurance Appraisals
Many older clients have little use for their life insurance policies, yet they never consider donating them to charity. In fact, more than 75 percent...
Transferring Life Insurance by Gift or Sale
A client who has a personally owned life insurance policy comes to you. You convince her to either sell or gift the policy to an irrevocable life insurance...
Hedging Your Bets
Life insurance is unique among types of insurance in that it insures against an event (death) that will occur as opposed to an event that may occur. But,...
Nursing the Sick ILIT
Now more than ever, trustees, and in particular, corporate trustees, face administrative issues that arise in relation to an irrevocable life insurance...
A Shot Across the Bow
Last year, a ruling by the Indiana Court of Appeals, In Re Stuart Cochran Irrevocable Trust,1 sent a shot-across-the-bow warning to trustees trying to...
ILITs and the GST Tax: How Do We Fund Premiums in 2010?
The estate and generation-skipping transfer (GST) tax will reappear in 2011. For some insureds and the trustees of their irrevocable life insurance trusts...
Do Your Homework on Indexed Universal Life Insurance
The world of life insurance presents what feels like a never-ending array of products and choices. One of these emerging product structures, indexed universal...
An Adviser's Guide for Reviewing Life Insurance
Once issued, a life insurance policy can remain in effect for decades. During this time, the original owner's goal and objectives may have changed, or...
Domestic Private Placement Life Insurance
Private placement variable universal life insurance (PPVUL) products are available through some of the largest insurance companies in the United States....
I Do, Act II
Estate planning in the context of second marriages is increasingly common and necessary in the evolving world in which we practice. Estate-planning techniques...
Advance Health Care Directives
I've counseled thousands of clients about the need for advance directives as an integral, critical component of an estate plan. Advance directives can...
Private Split-dollar Arrangements
For estate planning using life insurance, and especially for large premium cases, split dollar offers an attractive method for funding the premiums with...
Turning Pennies Into Dollars For Charities
I am a bit of a spiritual seeker. Last summer, in search of the meaning of life, I trekked up one of the highest peaks in the Himalayas to seek the answer...
The Medicaid Trust
The cost of long-term health care continues to spiral and insurance companies continue to cover fewer and fewer long-term needs. As a result, it's important...
Asset Protection for the Middle Class
There's a new type of asset protection technique that's evolved from a well-established and highly effective elder law planning tool: the irrevocable...
The Estate Planner's Guide To Product Suitability
Out in the field, life insurance policies are generally not selected, designed or funded to most effectively support today's complex estate plans and...
Long-term Care Is Critical
Perhaps the greatest development in the world of elder care and special needs law during 2009 was the lack of any real development. With the national...
A Buy-Sell Innovation
Traditional buy-sell agreements can't always solve all problems dealing with death, retirement, withdrawal and disability without creating difficulties...
The Beauty of SCINsurance
Historically low interest rates have made self-canceling installment notes (SCIN) an attractive estate-planning tool and a viable alternative to life...
What Form Should Your Private Foundation Take?
A quick guide to choosing between two possible entities: non-profit corporation and charitable trust...
Long-term Care Lawsuits Will Just Keep Coming
Many long-term care (LTC) insurance carriers are facing an avalanche of lawsuits from disgruntled policyholders,1 some involving policies more than two...
Climate Change
Today's investment and political climate is causing a perceptible change in the way many clients approach the role of life insurance in their financial...
The Good and the Very Bad
Elder law experienced no cataclysms in 2008. But significant trends emerged and public benefits planning continued to mature. First, the good news: Medicaid...
Discount Private Split-Dollar Does It Work?
Do you think that split-dollar arrangements (other than premium loans under the split-dollar loan regime) faded away when the Internal Revenue Service...
Insurance LLC Helps Business Owners
Owners of closely held businesses have long sought ways to buy the interest of an owner who dies. They also have sought ways to enjoy the business' success...
Today's Split Dollar
The final split-dollar regulations that were effective as of Sept. 17, 2003 (T.D. 9092) became the operative guidance for arrangements that either were...
Still Nervous About That Insurable Interest
For years, advisors have gone blissfully along in their planning for families and business owners, devising wonderfully helpful trusts and solving liquidity...
Handle With Care
Do you know how many of your clients own non-qualified deferred annuities?1 Does their estate planning consider how those annuities are subject to different...
Life Insurance In Qualified Plans
Most people would like some life insurance. Problem is, no one really wants to pay for it. So, since the beginning of time, life insurance professionals...
What To Do With Those Existing Split-Dollar Plans
It's been five years since the Internal Revenue Service issued Notice 2002-8, the pronouncement that was supposed to clarify treatment of those split-dollar...
The Twilight of Employer-Sponsored Health Insurance?
There's a lot of talk lately about revamping our health care system to address its outrageous costs and the millions of uninsured. ...
Keep Up With Your Clients
Baby boomers are hunkering down for retirement. They are putting computer to spreadsheet, as it were, and running asset and cash flow projections, with...
Sell Your Policy?
Who should consider life settlement as one alternative to managing life insurance capital? When is a settlement a wise decision? What factors should be...
SPLIT-DOLLAR OPPORTUNITIES
Although the Treasury Department and the Internal Revenue Service have significantly diminished its income tax advantages, split-dollar insurance can...
Get the Best Offer
Most people would say the hardest part about the life insurance business is getting people to pay for the insurance. I disagree. Once a person selects...
PPLI Primer
Cash value life insurance through its tax-deferred growth of the cash value, tax-free access to that cash value and a tax-free death benefit can provide...
Using FTDs In Buy-Sell Plans
Smart business owners plan for the orderly disposition and transfer of their interests in their companies in the event of their death, disability or retirement....
Cash Out or Cash In?
Many of our clients who bought cash value life insurance policies are taking a hard look at their policies in light of changed circumstances or a changed...
Premium Financing Solutions
Many wealthy clients and owners of closely held businesses need to acquire a substantial amount of life insurance to provide liquidity to pay for their...
THE FMV OF LIFE INSURANCE CONTRACTS
The Internal Revenue Service issued Revenue Procedure 2005-25 on April 8, providing additional guidance on determining the fair market value (FMV) of...
A New Way Of Doing Business
The past year was difficult for life insurance in estate planning. This year will be worse. But the astute insurance professional and other members of...
