Last week’s post discussed gift-giving in general with a promise to look more closely at gifts to charity. Gifts to charity aren’t governed by the gift tax rules but by the income tax rules. Essentially, giving to charity is deemed ...
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As the year-end holidays approach, many of us are thinking about giving gifts to our family, friends, charities, and even our employees. Tax law has rules that affect this generosity. In the tax law, a gift is marked by “detached ...
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DAPTs are trusts established under the laws of a state such as Delaware, Nevada, South Dakota, Tennessee, Ohio, or Alaska that allows self-settled spendthrift trusts. Historically, one could not protect one’s own assets from one’s own creditors by transferring them to ...
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Last week’s post discussed the differences between revocable and irrevocable trusts. This week, we turn our attention to types of irrevocable trusts. There are too many to describe here but some of the most popular follow:

• GRATs are trusts ...
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The simplest way to explain the difference is that a revocable trust is one you can change and an irrevocable trust is one you can’t change. To be more precise, an irrevocable trust is one you can’t change easily. In ...
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October is National Cybersecurity Awareness Month and lawyers should be paying attention to the need to protect their clients’ data. In fact, the Kentucky Bar Association released Ethics Op. E-446 on July 20, 2018, affirming the lawyer’s ethical duty to ...
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Clients often ask how frequently they should review their estate planning documents. The answer varies. One should review them after any major events in a family’s life, such as a birth, marriage, change of employment, retirement, divorce, or death. After ...
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The preceding two articles talked about getting appointed by the probate court and marshalling the estate assets and paying creditors’ claims. This article will discuss paying taxes, paying the beneficiaries, and closing the estate. Estates must pay income taxes if ...
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Last week’s article covered admitting a will to probate and getting appointed by the court. Once the personal representative is appointed, what does he or she do? The first step is to go online (during the week as the website ...
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Recent articles have discussed how to use trusts to avoid probate and what happens in Kentucky when you die without a will. It is now time to describe the probate procedure itself. Because probate involves too many steps to cover ...
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