Beneficiary Designation

Our firm increasingly sees clients with large retirement account balances or large life insurance policies without a contingent or secondary beneficiary.  These assets will pass according to the beneficiary designation without being part of your probate estate as long as a beneficiary is named.  However, these assets are considered part of your total estate and [...]

I just returned from three days in Grapevine, Texas getting trained on the latest features of WealthCounsel software and the latest changes in Estate Planning. The change I am bringing back to my practice is the use of Standalone Retirement Trusts to hold retirement assets. WealthCounsel has developed a trust that can hold a retirement [...]

You can easily write your own will, power of attorney, medical power of attorney, and living will using an on-line package.  Most of the software packages do a pretty good job for the “I love you wills” giving everything to your spouse, then to your children.  The software replicates what most general practice attorneys can [...]

I recently spent the afternoon with an elderly woman planning how to distribute her large real estate holdings fairly upon her death.  I asked her how she had accumulated all that property.  She said that her husband had died at fairly young age leaving her with life insurance proceeds.  She used that money to pay [...]

I recommend using this format: John Smith IRA/ Deceased 1/1/2009/ FBO (for the benefit of) Mary Smith as beneficiary. Make sure that the financial institutions gets the titling right not only on the statements it sends to you, but also on the internal records it uses for reports to the IRS, he says. Some large [...]

Beneficiary designation is critical to your estate plan especially when naming who gets the proceeds of your life insurance proceeds and your retirement plans. These funds are transferred directly to the people you name without going through probate. A spouse has the option of rolling over retirement monies into his or her IRA. Required distributions [...]