The 3 Phases of a Financial Plan
{4 minutes to read} Today, I want to talk about the three phases of a financial plan: Phase One: Wealth Accumulation. Phase Two: Wealth Distribution. Phase Three: Wealth Preservation. Phase One: Wealth Accumulation Most people spend a good amount of time in this phase — from the time they start earning money to the time they stop working. They are faced with a lot of options and choices as to where they should place their money so that it accumulates and grows. Phase Two: Wealth Distribution After Phase [...]
Purchasing Life Insurance with Before-Tax Dollars
Today I want to talk about life insurance and how it can be purchased. Most of the time people buy life insurance with after-tax dollars — dollars that they've already paid taxes on. Since the SECURE Act was signed into law, one of the things we are doing more and more is looking at ways to buy life insurance that are creative and don't affect your cash flow. For instance, if you have a business and you have a profit sharing or a 401(k) plan, that account can [...]
Special Needs Planning
{4 minutes to read} Special needs planning comes about when we have clients that have a dependent (child or adult) who is not going to be able to take care of himself or herself when the parents are gone. Taking care of this special needs individual is a very, very important part of estate planning. The challenge for many who have children is the sense of responsibility they feel for the wellbeing of those children throughout their lifetimes. They will do anything for them, but that responsibility ends [...]
The Season of Giving
{4 minutes to read} ‘Tis the season, as they say, for gifting. So today we're going to focus on that task. We are in a unique time period where, under the recent tax law change that Donald Trump put in, the ability for ultra-high-net-worth and high-net-worth people to gift a large amount of money is a window that is potentially going to disappear. With Donald Trump’s tax reform, the exemption for what you could give away was doubled from about $5 million to about $10 million per person, [...]
November is Long-Term Care Month
{4 minutes to read} At the time of this writing, it is Election Day, November 3rd, 2020. And besides being a very big day in America, it is also Long-Term Care Awareness Month. Long-term care, to me, is a very personal thing because both my parents and my wife Donna's parents spent time in assisted living nursing homes and hospice before the four of them passed away. This continues to be a really important issue for people's retirement planning because, without long-term care insurance in force, people are [...]