Life Insurance Asset Management
It's an unfortunate fact that many policies will simply not perform as their policy owners expect them to, and yet; Many policy owners, insureds, and trustees are not aware of the risk that the policy they own will not remain in force for their entire life. People manage their Investments, they manage their real estate, but when it comes to their Life Insurance, they buy it, and then rarely look at it again. More often than not, this "hands off" approach will create an underperforming policy that can [...]
Estate Planning Opportunities Courtesy of the Coronavirus
{4 minutes to read} First and foremost, I want to encourage everyone to do their best to stay healthy and be safe practicing social distancing. As I say to everybody, stay home, stay safe, and stay sane during this difficult period that we're going through. Whenever we go through difficult periods, we often find opportunities. I'm going to go over opportunities for three different types of people: Pre-Retirees Pre-retirees are those who are working and accumulating money, with retirement potentially 5-10 years or more down the road. [...]
Smart Estate Planning: The Demise of the Stretch IRA
{3 minutes to read} Today, I want to talk about the new legislation called the SECURE Act. As we reported in an earlier blog, the SECURE Act was signed into law recently and one of the major components of the Act is to reform the stretch IRA, which allowed people who inherited an IRA to take their required distributions based upon their life expectancy. So, if someone died and their child inherited that IRA, they wouldn't have to take all of the money, which is taxable income, right [...]
Don’t Surrender That Life Insurance Policy or Let It Lapse!
{4 minutes to read} Today, I want to talk about a situation that came up with one of our clients which caused me to want to share something important about life insurance. No one should ever surrender or let their life insurance policy lapse before doing appropriate due diligence and review. Even if it's a term policy that you no longer need, it might have value in the secondary market. Term insurance doesn't have cash value but there are companies, whether they are hedge funds or private equity, [...]
The SECURE Act of 2019
{2 minutes to read} Today, I want to talk about new retirement plan rules based upon the SECURE Act of 2019. SECURE stands for Setting Every Community Up for Retirement Enhancement and there are some major changes for qualified plans. First, an individual who attains the age of 70 and a half by the end of the year would have to start taking Required Minimum Distributions (RMDs) from their IRA's qualified plans. These distributions are taxable. Since people are living longer, the SECURE Act has now changed the [...]