What if Your Brakes Fail? Although rare, total brake failure can be a terrifying and perilous experience. As in all emergency situations, remaining calm is the first and most important step. In addition to that: Shift into a lower gear if your car has an automatic transmission. If it has a manual transmission, downshift. Engage … Read more
Reverse mortgages, usually obtained from financial institutions, allow people who are at least 62 years of age to convert their home equity into cash, which is received by the homeowner either as a lump sum, a line of credit, or monthly payments. The loan becomes due, with interest, when the borrower dies, moves out of the home, sells it, or fails to pay property taxes or homeowners insurance. The end result is often that heirs of the owner sell the house, pay off the loan, and keep the difference.
If, like so many, you are prone to disorder in the keeping of important documents, assuming that you keep them at all, you may be well past due for a makeover of your estate plan and your end-of-life instructions. It is not just a matter of maintaining tidiness for its own sake: a lot of money and time could be saved by making your estate plan organized and accessible and then keeping it that way.
This video considers some of the reasons for hiring a lawyer and discusses some ways to evaluate lawyers that you interview.
A major health services company with thousands of employees overhauled its pension plan some years ago. As it explained to the employees at the time, their
then-existing benefits would all be converted into a hypothetical lump sum, which would constitute the opening account balance for the new plan. That amount
would then grow by a percentage of the employee’s pay each year. It all sounded as though there was nothing to which the employees could object.
For some people, life insurance may not spring to mind immediately as an effective estate planning tool. A life insurance policy remaining in the estate of the
insured is subject to federal estate taxes. However, when carefully crafted and put in place with the guidance of an appropriate professional, there is a way both
to obtain the familiar benefits of a life insurance policy–providing a measure of financial security for the beneficiaries–and to remove the policy’s proceeds
from exposure to the estate tax. The vehicle is called an Irrevocable Life Insurance Trust (ILIT).
You have a small successful business and you just have that feeling that it could be replicated with equal success. One traditional means of doing this would be to open more company stores on your own, but doing so obviously would take lots of capital and time, and you can only be stretched so far and still feel in control of what could be distant additional locations.
Franchising is a time-tested alternative for expansion that, at least over the long run, should involve less of your own time and money. If all goes well, and the odds of that are certainly enhanced by getting good professional advice at each step in the process, you can expand using someone else’s money, your risks will be reduced because the franchisees will take on most of the responsibilities and risks that come with opening new stores, and expansion should occur more rapidly than if you go it alone.
Having a net worth of $1 million, or maybe even $2 million, does not give you entry into such a small exceptional group as used to be the case. By some estimates, between 5 and 6 million American households have a net worth of at least $2 million. This means that currently there are considerably more people who should consider how best to shield their money from the IRS and pass it on to their heirs, assuming that is their wish. One such strategy that just became more attractive, due to new federal legislation, is the making of gifts during one’s lifetime.
On December 17, 2010, the president signed into law an $858 billion federal tax package. The main elements of the legislation are a two-year extension of the reductions of income, capital gains, and dividend taxes enacted during the Bush Administration and a one-year extension on unemployment insurance benefits that had ended as of December 1. Although many parts of the package are of relatively short duration, below are some highlights of the new tax law:
Beginning in January 2011, a 2% drop in an employee’s share of the Social Security portion of the FICA tax, from 6.2% to 4.2%, will increase take-home pay for most workers. For example, this means an additional $1,600 in 2011 for someone making $80,000 a year.