We don’t know when, but we do know estate and gift tax reform is coming sometimes in the next 13 months. There are almost as many plans as there are Senators, but one of the most comprehensive and regressive is The “Sensible Estate Tax Act of 2011” introduced November 17, 2011 by Congressman Jim [...]
Because emergency documents are prepared and intended to be used prospectively, it is crucial that each document reflect your intention, be properly signed and attested, and written in clear language that will be understood by the third party provider to whom it is presented for the purpose of inducing that third party provider to [...]
Powers of Attorney, the most common of estate planning tools, are parceled out by estate planning attorneys like aspirin, but they seldom work when needed. Here’s why – Generic Powers of Attorney will work very well for a large variety of purposes that are seldom encountered, but they usually won’t work well in the [...]
View The AFL Letter I have recently received an important accolade. I have been selected as one of Arizona Finest Lawyers, a peer reviewed validation that strives to identify the top 10% of Arizona lawyers. This was an unsolicited and no-fee accolade bestowed on me without any action by me. The validating organization is a [...]
By now you have probably heard that on December 17, 2010, Congress increased the estate tax exemption to 5 million dollars. You may also have heard the new term “portability” thrown about; read that the estate, gift, and GST taxes have once again been “reunified” at the 5 million dollar level; and that this is [...]
Over my many years practicing law I have become a niche lawyer concentrating on estate planning. A growing part of my estate planning practice involves administration of trusts and estates. An inevitable part of trust or estate administration is resolving contested matters. Unhappily, a large number of those disputes become litigated matters instead of models [...]
Apparently the suspicion surrounding end-of-life planning is not as far in the past as we might have hoped. The recent Medicare regulation which would have allowed the government to pay doctors who advise patients on options for end-of-life care was rescinded only days after it was enacted. Why such an abrupt turnaround? The reason [...]
I’ve been a practicing lawyer in Scottsdale for over 30 years and I have never witnessed a fire-storm like the rage that has engulfed the probate system in the past two years. I’d like to bring some sanity to the story and suggest a sensible solution. If you haven’t read the horrible stories or [...]
By now everyone knows that the President has signed a tax bill. The question now on everyone’s mind is exactly what did he sign, and what does it mean to you? Lower payroll taxes in 2011 and the historically low rates of taxes on dividends are good for all of us (not so good [...]
Do I provide what my clients really want? It has been suggested that estate planning lawyers rely too heavily on what they think clients want, providing services that are the easiest and most economical to give, rather than listening to what our clients really want. As a result we give our clients hefty estate planning [...]