Since 2010, FATCA -- that is, the U.S. Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act -- has been deemed a nemesis rather than a savior by legions of Americans living overseas.Although federal legislators undoubtedly anticipated a bit of blowback against a law they have always...
Bay Area Estate And Tax Planning Law Firm
Month: August 2017
The ABCs of federal estate taxes
The idea of estate taxes can be troubling. If you have extensive property that has a value of $10 million or more (if you are married), estate taxes can become a very real concern. However, for some people, estate taxes are never an issue. When you pass, the last...
Beneficiaries are far from powerless against bad-faith trustees
Trustees are central and authoritative figures regarding trust accounts, commanding a number of powers while they exercise close oversight and control over a trust's administration.Indeed, a trustee has discretion to act in a wide universe of matters, ranging from the...
Cakes, candles, parties and … due reflection on estate planning
Investment News editor and financial planner Mary Beth Franklin ended up with a key take away from her husband's recent 65th birthday that she didn't remotely suspect would materialize amidst the festivities.And that was this: that figurative and literal coming-of-age...
Offshore tax evasion: obviously, a top-tier priority for the IRS
"Follow the money."Those were the words uttered recently by a top IRS official within the agency's Criminal Investigation division (CI) concerning government attempts to track down alleged tax evaders with money secreted away in foreign accounts. The CI's targeting of...
Billie Lourd to inherit a vast estate
In a recent article published for Rolling Stone magazine, actress Billie Lourd revealed that she always lived in her mother’s and grandmother’s shadows. For the unititiated, Lourd’s famous mother and grandmother are Carrie Fisher and Debbie Reynolds,...
Updating your estate plan: a continuing look at this “must do” task
We stressed in our immediately preceding blog post the logical need for individuals and families in California and across the country to periodically revisit the estate plans they carefully crafted in the past. We noted in our July 27 entry that the financial...
Your rights as a surviving spouse
Most states, including California, have laws in place to protect surviving spouses and other potential heirs to a decedent's property. This means that if one spouse dies, the other still has inheritance rights even if a will was never written or an existing will never...