Estate Plan

WHEN STEWART MOTT graduated college in 1961, he received $6 million from his father, an auto industry entrepreneur who was one of the founders of General Motors. On top of the $6 million, a family trust began paying Mott an annual stipend of $850,000.
That allowed Mott to spend his adult life pursuing a variety of eccentric endeavors. He funded research on extrasensory perception. Inside his Manhattan apartment, he built a 10,000-square-foot garden, along with a chicken coop.

https://www.morningstar.com/retirement/ed-slott-how-roth-iras-can-help-with-estate-planning?utm_source=eloqua&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=AdvisorDigest&utm_content=None_62149&utm_id=32158

Here is the link to Christine Benz of Morningstar interviewing Ed Slott, who many consider THE expert in the country on the IRS’s interpretation of IRA laws/rules for 2025.
Ed is a gold mine of information as to how to decide on whether to convert traditional IRAs to Roths, and it’s effect on your beneficiaries.
https://app.mscomm.morningstar.com/e/er?utm_source=eloqua&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=MorningDigest&utm_content=None_62004&utm_id=32087&s=1258972516&lid=91893&elqTrackId=894e84e4e6dd4e4ea71a9bc97420afd2&elq=c1c50cb96d48485491b4d81fbe5a229d&elqaid=62004&elqat=1&elqak=8AF55770D8A5B2AC19A42DE86CB56351215EDD04764F052A1F72EA4FA79B9C459194

LIKE OTHER FOLLOWERS of HumbleDollar, I look forward to Jonathan’s Saturday articles. I have to admit that my interest has been heightened by his cancer diagnosis. Not many folks would have the courage to write about what’s going through their mind when they’re fighting for their life. We don’t often get this kind of insight into someone’s life.
Jonathan has probably received a lot of advice about treatment plans and the doctors he should see.

IT’S IMPORTANT TO BE familiar with what happens with Social Security benefits when someone dies. Otherwise, you may find yourself in a long, painstaking battle to get the payment to which your loved one was entitled. I found this out the hard way.
My father-in-law Bernard died in September 2015. My wife was his executor and the agent under his power of attorney (POA). But I’d earlier served as POA and executor for my mother,

I TURN AGE 62 IN January—which means I could claim Social Security retirement benefits and perhaps collect at least a few monthly checks before I succumb to cancer.
But is that the smartest strategy? One of my top priorities is ensuring Elaine is financially comfortable after I’m gone, so I want to make sure she gets as much from Social Security as possible.
We got married in late May, a few days after I was told I had lung cancer that had metastasized to my brain and elsewhere.

IT WAS 1982 OR thereabouts. After attempting to be a landlord for several years, I decided it wasn’t for me. I sold the house and the four-family apartment building I’d been managing.
The final task in closing out this adventure would come at tax time. Keeping the books was the one aspect of being a landlord that I didn’t mind. I understood how accumulated appreciation would be recaptured and how capital gains tax would affect that year’s taxes.

WHEN I WAS A YOUNG adult, my parents sat me down and explained that I might at some point inherit money from my grandfather’s trust, which had also helped put me through college. My grandfather passed away in 1984, and his wife—my father’s stepmother—became the trust’s beneficiary.
My father was an only child. The trust stipulated that, if his stepmother died before him, he would receive two-thirds of the trust, while my two siblings and I would share the other third.

Five non community property states – Alaska, Florida, Kentucky, South Dakota and Tennessee, currently allow married couples to create community property trusts (CPT).
The benefit of a CPT is the potential income tax savings to a surviving spouse via the full ‘step-up’ in basis of a home or other trust assets that occurs when the first spouse dies when assets held in the CPT are later sold.
There are likely a lot of negatives to establishing a CPT including complexity,

When we set up our Trust our lawyer instructed us to change our children as our secondary beneficiaries to our Trust. I was just reading Ed Slott’s The Retirement Savings Time Bomb Ticks LOUDER, and he states that there is no reason to have your trust named as a beneficiary for most people unless you have questions about the recipients responsibility. Also notes that your beneficiaries may have to empty the trust in less than 10 years.

My wife and I just had our wills and POAs redone. We changed our domicile form PA to NJ a few years ago, and it was recommended we have them updated. I was surprised how different some of the documents were from state to state. For example, NJ has an 11 day period before a will can be probated, starting form the date of death. PA does not have that. The Medical POA and Advanced Directive was very narrative driven;

As I’ve written here before, my mother-in-law has been dealing with Alzheimer’s, and this last year has been a constant learning curve of navigating long-term care policies, trying out in-home caregivers (pretty major fail), and finally a memory care residential facility.
Well, this past week was a new challenge. My MIL passed away suddenly on Tuesday night. We got a call from the memory care facility that she’d fainted several times,  so they’d called an ambulance.

My wife and I moved from PA to NJ about 3 years ago. After we moved I looked into whether we should update our estate documents since we changed states. It seemed like a smart thing to do, but it took us 3 years to get around to it.
We recently met with a local estate attorney and reviewed our wills and POAs. There was some specific Pennsylvania language having to do with setting up a trust for contingency heirs – our grandsons – if one of our sons pre-deceased us.

A recent forum post explored the topic of how to financially protect a surviving spouse. Several commenters mentioned they either had, or were planning to, delay the higher earners Social Security (SS) retirement benefit until 70 to assure that the surviving spouse received the maximum benefit. This is the plan my wife and I are employing, delaying my benefit until I reach 70.
We are currently updating our estate documents, and during a discussion my wife asked me what would happen if I died before I turned on my SS benefit.

WHO HAS TIME TO die? I never realized death would be so busy.
I thought I had my financial affairs in good order. But in the two months since my cancer diagnosis, I’ve made countless financial tweaks, mostly with a view to making things easier after my death for my wife Elaine and my two children.
Here are just some of the steps I’ve taken:

I took my two checking accounts—my personal account and the business account for HumbleDollar—and made Elaine the joint account holder with rights of survivorship.