Estate & Financial Planning

PERSPECTIVES IN THIS ISSUE Estate planning Estate planning without taxesIntro to trustsAn avoidable tax disasterA tax disaster avoided Retirement planning    An outstanding retirement deal March 2022 Estate planning without taxes   Put your beneficiaries first. The traditional “hot button” that motivates people to see their lawyers about estate planning is taxation. Death taxes—inheritance taxes, estate taxes, federal taxes, state taxes—have taken a notorious toll on unplanned estates over the years. With sound planning, that burden can be lightened or even eliminated. In some cases, the tax savings easily cover the cost of the attorney’s fees for creating the estate plan. However, that hot button has cooled considerably in recent years, as the federal estate tax has been increasingly targeted to

PERSPECTIVES IN THIS ISSUE Estate planning Small business succession planningWhat if you prefer to sell your business? Retirement planning    Important 2022 retirement planning numbers PhilanthropyDirect charitable gifts from an IRA Estate Planning Succession planning is more important than ever. In an average year, about 600,000 establishments go out of business, according to the Federal Reserve. The advent of the pandemic was feared to boost that figure sharply, which led to Congress adopting the Paycheck Protection Plan. The legislation appears to have softened the blow of the pandemic on business, because as of last April there were only about 200,000 excess business closings, again according to Federal Reserve data. About 70,000 of those were units of major companies that did not

PERSPECTIVES IN THIS ISSUE  Estate planning How to choose your trustee If you’ve decided against a corporate fiduciary Core advantages that we bring to the job of trusteeship Retirement planning Smaller RMD’s in 2022 Financial managment “Buy, Borrow, Die” Traditionally, the hot button for estate planning has been the reduction of federal and state death taxes. That tradition has been over for some time, given the increases in the amounts exempt from federal estate tax over the last decade. The 2021 federal exemption stands at $11.7 million, and married couples may double that with routine estate planning. (Note, however, that under current law the exemption falls roughly in half in 2026, unless Congress acts sooner.) Freedom from estate and inheritance

PERSPECTIVES IN THIS ISSUE  Retirement Retirement income management The scary word for retirees: Inflation Estate planning Marriage, Israeli style Timing may be more important than many realize. Investor truism: Time in the market is more important than timing the market. For those with a long-term time horizon, volatility in the financial markets is relatively unimportant. Imagine that a portfolio has an aver- age 10-year return of a modest  5%, but the yearly returns are 25%, 18%, 3%,  -4%,  -28%,  -2%,  8%,  10%, 12%, and 8%. Does it matter when the  bad years occur? It does not. Table One below shows what would happen to $500,000 over ten years. On the left, the bear market comes early, pushing the portfolio into loss territo-