You’ve worked extremely hard to fund your retirement plan, pay off your house and amass enough savings to cover future expenses—but without a proper estate plan, all your success could fall into the hands of the wrong person once you’re gone. In this episode, CFP® Joe Anderson and CPA Alan Clopine dive in to critical estate planning tips for constructing a will or living trust, funding a trust, updating beneficiary forms and understanding estate taxes. Estate planning associate, Tom Lawler, joins the show to discuss the different types of living trusts you can choose from.
Important Points
1:20 “64% of Americans don’t even have a simple [estate] plan in place” [Source: Legal Zoom]
3:05 “Make sure you look at estate taxes, that you consider that, because right now there are some pretty big exemptions so a lot of you will not have estate taxes, but just be aware that if you’re subject to them, there are some strategies that you want to take advantage of”
6:19 “If you have any type of assets whatsoever, you should have a will so you know when you’re gone that there’s a document there to tell the courts or someone what the direction is going to be…if you have more than $100,000, if you have real property, that’s where the trust comes in”
7:24 “Did you know that people who work for the government are 20% more likely to have employment-based health insurance than those who work in the private sector?” [Source: Employee Benefits Research Institute]
10:05 “The idea behind a trust is to avoid those things, you want to go inexpensively, privately and quickly. That’s really what the trust does for you versus the probate which might last a year”
10:36 “Simple trust, A/B trust and disclaimer trust—those are the basic three that we use over and over”
15:03 “Double check all of your assets; if you do have a living trust to make sure that it’s funded…funding of the trust is one of the biggest mistakes that we see for individuals who do have a trust”
19:10 “If I designate my 16 year old grandson as my IRA beneficiary, he won’t have to take required distributions until he turns 59 1/2.—this is absolutely false”
23:05 “There are a lot of advanced estate planning strategies from family limited partnerships to charitable trusts and on and on and on to actually significantly reduce that estate tax”
