New York Estate Planning Lawyer Blog

Long-term care insurance is one of the biggest topics of conversation among retirees and estate planners. The industry is going through a period of turmoil with many policyholders now cashing in on their long-term care needs and few new buyers signing up for long-term care insurance. As a result, companies that carry long-term care insurance are shifting the way that they approach these types of policies, and consumers should be looking for new trends in long-term care insurance.

Long-Term Care Insurance

There is good reason for shifting trends in the long-term care insurance industry. Sales for individual policies have plummeted over 75% in the last ten years, and only ten percent of long-term care insurance carriers are still in business. Those that remain continue to increase the premiums and tightly underwrite all of their policies. At this point, most long-term care insurance plans are only available for the wealthy and are unaffordable to the lower and middle class.

There are many couples at retirement age that have been together for years but have opted to not get married for personal, professional, or legal reasons. For these unmarried couples, estate planning is crucial if you want your partner to inherit from your estate. If the homeowner dies without a will in place, the other partner would be out on the street with little to no recourse. However, there are options to ensure that your partner is protected through your estate plan while simultaneously planning for the other loved ones in your life.

Estate Planning Options

For couples that want to protect their partner but still leave the home to their children, one of the more popular ways of dealing with this problem is to create a life estate for the surviving partner. If drafted correctly, the partner gets the right to live in the home until they move into a nursing home facility or pass away, at which point the real estate would revert to the children. If a couple decides to go with this option, it is smart to also leave money to the spouse specifically for the purpose of house maintenance and upkeep.

In the age of the internet, concern must be paid to the digital assets in addition to the physical assets of your estate when you pass away. While there have been considerable issues with this in the past, social media companies are finally instituting policies to handle the social media of a person who has died. Some companies like Twitter and LinkedIn will deactivate or remove your social media account when they have been notified of the death, but other social media companies like Facebook are taking digital asset protection one step further.

Facebook Legacy Contact

The Facebook legacy contact is the company’s newest way of dealing with a deceased account holder’s social media page when they pass away. You can appoint a person as your legacy contact, and it can be anyone who also has an account with Facebook. That person is notified upon your death of their legacy status and given access to your memorialized social media page.

Celebrity estate stories are rife with lessons about mistakes to avoid when creating an estate plan, such as problems with the estates of James Gandolfini, James Brown, and Anna Nicole Smith. Poor estate planning can lead to probate, taxes, and family disputes. Failing to create an estate plan or drafting a poorly written plan can lead to many issues for your loved ones after you pass away, but there are some mistakes that you can avoid in order to minimize the chances of problems in the estate planning process.

Mistake #1: Thinking You are Too Young or Possess Too Little

In 2012, a report from Texas Tech University revealed that only around 54% of all Americans possess an estate plan. Many do not create a will or other estate planning documents because they believe that they are too young or do not possess enough to warrant a will. However, a good estate plan does not just pass your assets to your loved ones when you die; it can also protect you while you are alive.

The White House has come forward and stated that President Barack Obama’s advisers would recommend that he veto pending bill, authored by Republicans, which would repeal the federal estate tax. A veto on the bill could happen as soon as Thursday, although experts believed that it stood little chance of becoming law. Democrats in the federal legislature and other lobbying groups all disagree with the repeal of the federal estate tax because of the damage that it would cause to the federal deficit.

Repealing the Estate Tax

Known by its opponents as a “death tax,” the federal estate tax reaches as high as forty percent on estates valued at more than the federal exemption level, $5.43 million for 2015. The tax is applied to the value of the estate that passes the $5.43 million mark unless it is protected through other estate planning means like trusts, retirement accounts, and the like. Proponents of the bill repealing the federal estate tax claim that it only serves to unduly burden grieving family members. However, the White House has said in a statement that it disagrees.

The White House administration is pushing for legislation that would make it harder for retirement fund brokers to push higher fee mutual funds or other expensive products to people who are trying to save for retirement. The plan, issued by the federal Labor Department, would require brokers to act in the best interests of their clients, which is a change that could drastically affect the earnings of financial advisers in the handling of retirees’ funds.

Old Brokerage Rules

President Obama said that the current regulations regarding brokers are out of date and come from an age where employees could rely upon a pension from their employers. “Financial advisers absolutely deserve fair compensation,” the President said, “But they shouldn’t be able to take advantage of their clients.” Under the current rules, brokers can sell any financial product that they deem “suitable” for an investor, which means that it fits the client’s needs and financial risk.

When a couple is getting married the last thing that they are typically worried about is estate planning. However, once the honeymoon is over you should sit down with your new spouse and update your individual estate plans to reflect the new status of your marriage. The following tips are a good place to start when combining two individual estate plans into one.

Visit the HR Department

Nowadays, your employer typically handles your retirement accounts and life insurance forms. Once you have been married, you should visit your HR department to update the beneficiary forms for these documents to include your new spouse. Beneficiary accounts are different from other assets in an estate, so if the beneficiary is left as someone different the value of the account will go to them and not the spouse.

Living and working abroad while maintaining your United States citizenship can add a layer of complexity to the estate planning process. International property, assets, accounts, taxation, and other issues that can affect estate plans must be considered that normally do not complicate the estate planning process. If you expect to be working as an expat, consider looking into the following issues for your estate plan before you go.

Review Your Estate Plan

It may seem basic, but review your estate plan before you go abroad. Update any necessary documents or beneficiary forms before leaving and make sure that everything is set with your attorney in the United States before going abroad. It would also be helpful to review the interactions between the U.S. legal system and the laws where you will be going to so that you can understand how your estate plan may be affected by the move.

A lot of people who are saving for retirement prefer to use Roth IRAs as part of their retirement plan. This after-tax income can go a long way in retirement, but annual contribution limits can place a constraint on how much money can be saved. Fortunately, there are “back door” options for funding a Roth IRA that get around the contribution limits and allow the account to grow more quickly. One of the fastest growing back door options is using the funds in an employer-sponsored 401(k).

401(k) to Roth IRA Strategies

An employer-sponsored 401(k) account is mainly used to defer the traditional pre-tax contribution limit. For 2015, the limit is $18,000 or $24,000 for employees over the age of fifty years old. However, some 401(k) account holders have started to use the after-tax contribution limit as a way to contribute to a Roth IRA. This system works because the after-tax limit for a 401(k) allows the client to defer money than the pre-tax limit, which for 2015 is a total of $53,000.

In a bizarre care, a woman in New Hampshire admitted in court that she told police that she dug up her father’s grave in search of his “real will” but was rewarded with only vodka and cigarettes. Melanie Nash, 53, pleaded guilty last week as one of four people who opened her father’s vault and rifled through his casket last May.

According to the prosecutor, the scene was reminiscent of an Edgar Allen Poe tale. Ms. Nash believed that she was unjustly shorted out of her part of her father’s estate when he died in 2004. She did not receive anything when he died and had been thinking of digging up her father’s grave for years to try and prove that her sister hid the will in his casket. Her sister, Susie Nash, has always maintained that there was only one will created in 1995 along with the rest of the estate planning documents and that everyone involved in the process knew about it.

In Search of the Real Will