To a New Yorker, this seems impossible, but in some states, a child may be personally liable for a deceased parent’s medical bills. Over half the states have legislation variously referred to as Filial Support or Filial Responsibility Laws. These statutes oblige children to satisfy their parents’ medical debts even if the child made no
Will Rogers, a folksy humorist for those too young to know, once said that “a Republican moves slowly. They are what we call conservatives. A conservative is a man who has plenty of money and doesn’t see any reason why he shouldn’t always have plenty of money. A Democrat is a fellow who never had
I. Tax changes, the latest developments.
The Trusts and Estates community is awash with rumors of the tax changes being proposed in Washington. Every day, the inbox is filled with rumors, invitations to webinars on planning opportunities, and the “dire” consequences of some of the proposals. The lobbyists are more numerous in Washington than people
Pity the poor estate planners. They are like zookeepers managing an ever increasing menagerie of exotic beasts, creatures of the tax code and regulations designed to take maximum, albeit legitimate, advantage of the complexities increasingly built into the system. For example: CRATs, CRUTs, FLPs, Zeroed-Out CLATs, Stretch IRAs, RMDs, GRUTs, DAPTs, Grantor Trusts, SLATs, etc.
While the producers of the television show Jeopardy are trying to find a replacement to the late Alex Trebek (your writer is old enough to remember the original host Art Fleming), a popular category of the game show provides the title for this week’s collection of trusts and estates related news, Potpourri.
Daniel Craig is a prominent actor, one of the most recent incarnations of the James Bond franchise. Mr. Craig made headlines recently with his announcement that he finds that “inheritance is distasteful.” He plans to give little if anything to his children and the rest to charity. Shocking. Positively shocking? No, a charitable disposition is
Last week we introduced the story of a battle over a portion of the Walt Disney fortune. His grandson is challenging the sale of a ranch in Wyoming by the trustees of a family trust. The article reporting the story contained a number of questionable statements that might be worth reviewing if only to illustrate
Walt Disney’s Wonderful World of Color was a feature (albeit not in color) of my Sunday evenings as a boy (although not as much as Wild Kingdom and Bonanza). This blog entry concerns the Disney fortune and the problems that frequently arise in the generations that follow the demise of the creator of the great
A story is told about a conversation between two great writers on the nature of wealth. F. Scott Fitzgerald, very enamored of the leisure class, is reputed to have said to Ernest Hemingway: “The rich are different from you and me.” In reply, Hemingway said: “Yes, they have more money.” And then there is the
I would rather have it said, ‘He lived usefully,’ than, ‘He died rich.’
Many people erroneously ascribe to Adam Smith, the founder of modern economics, an ideological hostility to taxation that he did not in fact espouse. In his time, he would have been known as a “moral philosopher,” and his first work
