Do I Need a Prenuptial Agreement?
Love Actually: Planning Considerations for Marriage, Divorce, Cohabitation, the Death of a Spouse, and More
Mamma Mia!: Common Estate Planning Issues for Blended Families
How Much an Arizona Divorce Will Cost
DE Talk | Resiliency & Determination: The Military Spouse Employee Makeup
Life After Love Gone Wrong Podcast: Season 3, Episode 7 - Invisible Scars: The Impact of Coercive Control on Children
DE Under 3: An Explanation of the Current Federal Budget Bill Confusion
Life After Love Gone Wrong Podcast: Season 3, Episode 5 - Parallel Proceedings: The Intersection of Criminal Law and Family Law
DE Under 3: U.S. GAO Report on Military Spouse Employment Focused on Challenges of Part-Time Work
Life After Love Gone Wrong Podcast: Season 3, Episode 2 - Mortgage Mastery: Charting a Financial Course Post-Divorce
Life After Love Gone Wrong Podcast: Season 3, Episode 1 - The Truth Behind Coercive Control
Jewish Divorce Talk: Episode 8 - Narcissism and Parental Alienation Talk
Once Removed Episode 12: SLATs and the Case of McKim vs. McKim
Once Removed Episode 11: Spousal Lifetime Access Trusts, or SLATs
Jewish Divorce Talk: Episode 6 - “Let’s Gett Serious” Talk
Let's Talk About Common Law Marriage
Let's Talk What to Bring to Your First Family Law Appointment
The $6 Million Wedding
Immigration Settlement Clears the Way for Thousands of H-1B and L-1 Spouses to Work in the US
Marriage and Divorce Considerations for Health Care Providers
Too often, litigants (and sometimes attorneys) treat prenuptial agreements as documents that either don’t have to be followed and/or should be attacked as a matter of course to try to get the party who entitlements are...more
Washington state recently enacted some changes that may impact married couples and registered domestic partners. Under the new Spousal Personal Residence Exclusion, when a spouse/partner passes away on or after January 1,...more
The following is a summary of some of the key legislative and judicial updates from Illinois in 2024. Control and Protection of Trust Property - On August 9, 2024, Senate Bill 3343 (SB 3343) was signed into law, which...more
Today’s federal estate and gift tax laws may be remembered as the most generous to wealthy families since the Great Depression. The 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) doubled the federal estate, gift, and generation skipping...more
You may have heard of Spousal Lifetime Access Trusts (SLATS) lately, especially if you have been thinking about using your federal estate and gift tax exemption before the current higher exemption amount of $13.61 million is...more
Beginning in 2020 a new topic entered the estate planning world based on studies done at Cornell University. Cornell started what they call a “Family Reconciliation Project” and in 2021 they published data indicating that in...more
Death of a Parent- In the context of a family-owned business, it is often the case that the matriarch or patriarch of the family is also the chief executive of the business. They may have founded the business, or they may...more
Steve Murphy, chair of the private wealth services group, dives deeper into the subject of SLATs in this episode. SLATs can work well with estate tax benefits and creditor protection benefits, all while giving the spouse...more
Steve Murphy, chair of the private wealth services practice group at McGuireWoods, discusses the Spousal Lifetime Access Trust, also known as the SLAT. Steve explains the rights that your spouse can have in this trust through...more
On July 8, 2022, the IRS issued Revenue Procedure 2022-32, which provides a simplified method for taxpayers to obtain an extension of time to make a portability election of a deceased spouse’s unused exclusion amount (“DSUE”)...more
With the fate of the estate tax exemption uncertain, you may want to use the current large exemption to transfer assets to a trust to benefit your spouse. A spousal lifetime access trust (SLAT) can help transfer assets...more
The Internal Revenue Service has announced that the annual gift tax exclusion is increasing next year due to inflation. After four years of being at $15,000, the exclusion will be $16,000 per recipient for 2022—the highest...more
Getting remarried? Understand your spouse’s inheritance rights - If you’re getting remarried, you may have very different expectations than you did when you married the first time, especially when it comes to estate...more
Spousal Lifetime Access Trusts, or “SLATs,” may be the ideal vehicle for clients interested in pursuing wealth-transfer tax planning. Before deciding whether SLATs may be right for you and your family, it’s important to...more
Family-owned business owners in Washington State should be aware that leaving family-owned business interests outright to a surviving non-U.S.-citizen spouse can result in Washington estate taxes due at the first spouse's...more
In 2019, the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (the Act) and its resulting tax reform continued to dominate the planning landscape. As outlined in our 2018 Year-End Estate Planning Advisory, the Act made significant changes to individual...more
As estate planners, we have seen it all over the years. What we have learned is that people make some common mistakes. Whether due to procrastination, lack of follow through, or ignoring their own mortality! This article...more
After working and saving, clients are concerned that unexpected costs will become unplanned for drains on their Retirement Accounts (e.g, 401(k), IRA, Roth IRA, 403(b), etc.). As the need to pay for nursing home care nears,...more
With the current estate tax exemption of $11.4 Million per individual, combined with the portability of estate tax exemption between spouses, most married couples no longer need to establish individual revocable trusts solely...more
Federal Transfer Taxes - The Internal Revenue Service has announced the annual inflation adjustments for the 2019 tax year... Federal unified gift and estate tax exclusion increasing to $11,400,000: As of January 1,...more
There are special estate tax planning considerations when a non-U.S. citizen spouse is part of the picture. To be clear, a non-U.S. citizen spouse may be living in the U.S. and even hold a green card, but he or she does not...more
The family farm is a special asset. The family may have worked hard through decades, maybe even generations, to accumulate and develop the farm’s land, equipment and livestock. The children may be grown and successors to...more
The election for married couples to elect portability of the Federal Estate Tax Exemption was introduced in late 2010 when the Tax Relief Unemployment Insurance Reauthorization and Job Creation Act (“TRUIRJCA”) was signed...more
Individual and corporate citizens from countries around the world have moved to North Carolina and contributed materially to our state's economic, educational, and cultural growth. Foreign direct investment ("FDI") in North...more
On August 2, 2016 the U.S. Treasury Department issued proposed regulations addressing transfers between family members of interests in family-controlled entities (e.g., corporations, partnerships and LLCs). If enacted, these...more