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Be Transparent with Your Children About Your Estate Plan 52% of adult children don’t know where their parents keep their estate documents, and  58% don’t know the contents. Parents’ mortality is an uncomfortable topic, but avoiding it can mean children do not know Where to find important financial documents How to pick up the reins of a family business The location of scattered assets What debts are owed Without transparency, heirs may be surprised at the distribution of assets or confused about how to share assets they inherited jointly. This can result in permanent family riffs. Parents and their adult [...]

How Long Must Someone Survive You to Inherit from You? On December 27, 2016, Star Wars actress Debbie Fisher died after suffering a medical emergency while on a flight home from London. The next day, her mother, Debbie Reynolds, passed away after having a stroke while preparing for Fisher’s funeral. Having two deaths in the family in such rapid succession can be devastating, and it raises an important estate planning issue: What happens in California when someone who would otherwise inherit property from you dies shortly after you do? Does that property have to go through probate twice? The answer [...]

The U.S. Gift and Estate Taxes for Foreigners Most Americans don’t spend much time worrying about U.S. gift and estate taxes, because they don’t need to. For U.S. citizens and domiciliaries (don’t worry—I’ll come back to this term in a moment!), each tax offers generous exemptions. For instance, the gift tax isn’t even a concern until an individual makes gifts totaling more than $14,000 to a single person in a single year, and that’s doubled for gifts by married couples. Even above that amount, the first $5,490,000 in total lifetime gifts (or in estate value) are excluded from the gift [...]