Will My Facebook Page Join Me In Heaven?
What happens to your Facebook page, your Twitter account, your online banking and brokerage accounts and your emails when you die? Who has access to these “digital assets” and who can use and control them or close them down? This issue has been the subject… Read More
Clinton Proposes Estate Tax Increase on Super-Rich
As reported in an article from today’s (September 23, 2016) Wall Street Journal, Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton has proposed an increase in the federal estate and gift tax. She would lower the federal estate tax exemption from the 2016 amount of $5,450,000 per individual… Read More
Estate Planning Isn’t Just About Dying
Over the course of thirty years as a trusts and estates lawyer I have drafted hundreds, maybe even thousands, of wills. After all, that is what estates lawyer do – we help our clients memorialize the disposition of their assets when we they die. Wills… Read More
Material Interest Necessary to Obtain Decedent’s Tax Return
This guest post was authored by Mara Smith, a summer associate with Montgomery McCracken. For the last three years, you have spent one weekend during each of the summer months at your favorite great-aunt’s beachfront home in a swanky community at the Jersey Shore. Also, you… Read More
Disappearing Discounts
While the federal estate and gift tax used to be assessed at a maximum rate of the confiscatory fifty-five percent (55%) (and for a few years and for very large estates, an astounding sixty-five percent (65%)) it is now at the historically low figure of… Read More