Asset Protection Archive
A Widening Net
With 2011 come and gone, we look back at the recent developments in the area of asset protection planning. With fewer clients concerned about estate taxes...
Asset Protection: Then and Now
The field of asset protection is often stigmatized. The phrase may inspire thoughts of deadbeats, scam artists, and tax evaders.1 However, the concept...
Should Substantial Discounts Apply to Very Short Holding Periods?
What factors impact marketability discounts in restricted stock transactions? Typically, an investor's expected holding period is the primary determinant...
Restorative Payments
In March 2009, Bernard L. Madoff pleaded guilty to federal charges involving a Ponzi scheme....
Reassessing Risk
Since the financial crisis of 2008, global markets have been surprisingly resilient. Investors who continued to follow disciplined strategies have recovered much of their losses, if not their confidence....
Valuation Clauses
Since 2006, taxpayers have won three significant victories related to valuation clauses. Numerous articles have been written on McCord,1 Christiansen2...
Making a Federal Case?
On Oct. 26, 2009, Internal Revenue Service Commissioner Douglas Shulman, speaking at the annual meeting of the American Institute of Certified Public...
Business Sales and Legacy Decisions
Selling a family business is typically complicated and fraught with emotional issues for the owner. The owner is selling his means of livelihood, and...
Staying Out of Reach
When asset protection planning was in its infancy in the mid-80s, there were few developments and even fewer mentions in the estate-planning literature....
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,...
Offshore Asset Protection Trusts
The death of the offshore asset protection trust has, by some, been greatly exaggerated.1 In recent years, attacks on a few such trusts under extreme...
Beware of Federal Super Creditors
Is there such a thing as bulletproof asset protection against federal claims? Many estate planners say and advise their clients to use or rely on certain...
Pre-liquidity Planning
It has been 18 months since the collapse of Lehman Brothers and just over a year since the stock market touched its lows. Although the stock market has...
No Train Wreck, Now What?
Despite the dire economic prospects of 2008-2009 and many families' fears that they'd have to shut down their single family offices (SFOs), the train...
Risk Assessment
Financial professionals do it. Insurance professionals do it. Actuaries certainly do it. Yet we, as tax and estate planning professionals, all too often...
The Fully Discretionary Ascertainable Standard
A graying widower hires you to reduce his looming estate tax burden and to shelter the wealth he passes on against potential creditors of his descendants....
Cash Balance Plans
Investing for retirement can be problematic for professionals in partnerships or other types of closely held firms. Yes, that includes lawyers in law...
No Gain at Death
In a 2002 article,1 we examined at length the income-tax effects of the termination of a grantor trust by reason of the death of the grantor in the context...
Don't Be Foolish
In 2009, asset protection specialists watched a major Internal Revenue Service drive to flush out secret foreign bank accounts while a financial crisis...
Situs Shopping
Perhaps one of the most noticeable developments I'm seeing in the last couple of years is clients and their advisors paying increasing attention to situs...
Which Situs Is Best?
The unsettled estate tax environment and harsh economic climate have created a new competitiveness: to be considered the jurisdiction for trusts and win...
Estate Tax Exemption Portability?
It would provide a valuable bailout for certain clients—but could hurt others...
To My Son, I Leave All My Passwords
The need to deal with passwords and digital property at death is coming at us faster than we may think...
An Alternative to QPRTs
Transferring a personal residence to a qualified personal residence trust (QPRT) is a common estate-planning technique...
Closely Held Business Interests And the Trustee's Duty to Diversify
It's well settled in American jurisprudence governing trust administration that the trustee's duties of due care and prudence...
What Clients Want To Talk About Now
You'd think that with interest rates at historic lows, assets highly undervalued and the prospect of a permanent estate tax, we estate planners would be deep in tax-planning sessions with clients...
Tax Law Update
Despite her sole discretion over a trust, a decedent did not possess at the time of her death a general power of appointment over property in the trust....
Great Expectations, Disappointing Realities
These days everyone is suffering. The media has been all over the story of the credit bust, the drop in housing values, the stock market's dive since...
The Rest of the World
Clients are often more global than their U.S. advisors. But we can change that. Here are some key trends in trusts and estates internationally: Trusts...
Welcome To Your Nightmare
The evil eye of Congress, much like the eye in The Lord of the Rings, is focusing on Middle Earth and Middle Earth is us. Rumors abound about the details...
Let's Get It Right
Back in the summer,1 I warned that the financial markets were headed for serious problems. But even my worst fears pale in comparison to what actually...
Shake Up!
The economic crisis is hitting the family offices of America's wealthy. Expect closings of both single family offices (SFOs) and multi-family offices...
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...
You Already May Be An Asset Protection Lawyer
The mere words asset protection make some lawyers wince.1 They think asset protection is dirty and those engaged in it are the ambulance chasers of the...
Florida Surprise
To stop individuals who are on the verge of filing for bankruptcy from moving their wealth to states with laws that might better help them keep their...
Beneficiary-Controlled Trusts Can Lose Asset Protection
Advisors promote trusts as an indispensable component of the estate plan. We tout the importance of trusts for credit shelter and generation-skipping...
Alternate Uses For Self-Settled Trusts
Many advisors assume that domestic asset protection trusts (DAPTs) self-settled trusts established in the United States typically to protect trust assets...
Florida, the Tax Haven
Florida has evolved into a U.S. tax and creditor protection haven, seducing wealthy individuals to migrate south. One of the biggest draws is that Florida...
OFFSHORE TRUSTS: CROSSING THE TS
Offshore trusts are popular estate-planning tools for a various reasons, especially legal impunity. Some offshore jurisdictions don't recognize foreign...
Nailing the Lawyer For His Debtor-Client's Sins
So what exactly are fraud, fraudulent conveyance, deceit and fraudulent transfer and when are attorneys accountable? Being a trustee entails risk of personal...
