Category Archives: Advice and Tips

Happy Valentine’s Day!

How often do you get a love letter from your favorite life insurance professional?  From today’s New York Times, I picked out the following piece.  As a planner who works with the best planners in the country, I asked myself is there anything more important that we can do for our clients than to help them do “this” for the people they love?

“In 2010 my husband was diagnosed with cancer and given six months to live. Unbeknown to me, in between his treatments, he planned my life without him. Every little detail: where I should live, how to control finances by setting up payments, my health concerns. Everything. That is how he left me to go on without him. That is a romantic gesture.”  Bryan Murphy, 76, London

To read the full article, click here.

Someone shared the story below with me.  We really don’t need to make our client conversations or planning any more complicated.

Two Business Owners. Two Stories. One Critical Difference.

Last year, two small business owners, Mark and James, passed away unexpectedly within months of each other. Both had run successful companies for decades, each employing dozens of people and supporting their families through the enterprise they had built from scratch.

Mark had planned carefully. Years earlier, he worked with his advisor to purchase a well-structured life insurance policy tied directly to his business succession plan. When tragedy struck, the death benefit funded a buy-sell agreement. His family received fair value for his share of the company. His business partner used the proceeds to keep operations stable, pay off debts, and reassure employees and customers. Within weeks, the company was back on track. Mark’s vision lived on—and his family’s financial life remained secure.

James’s story was different. He had always said, “We’ll figure it out” when the topic of insurance arose. When he died, his family had no way to access the company’s cash flow or negotiate a buyout. The business struggled with leadership gaps, creditors became anxious, and key employees left. Within a year, the company folded. His family lost both the paycheck and the equity value. The ripple effects reached suppliers, clients, and employees across town.

The difference wasn’t in their work ethic or success—it was in their planning. Life insurance gave Mark’s business and family a future. The lack of it left James’s legacy vulnerable.

Sometimes it takes a real story to remind us why our work matters.

The Washington Report: – Wealth Transfer Edition

“All trust jurisdictions are not created equal. Choosing the jurisdiction with the best laws for the successful family is critical. In this modern, mobile world, the residence of the settlor, beneficiaries, and fiduciaries must be monitored and managed to avoid unintended consequences.  Successful families, no matter their location, are beginning to think nationally when deciding where to establish their irrevocable trusts.”   

To read the full report, click here.

From the New York Times, “The High Stakes of Low Quality” by Yvon Chouinard, founder and former owner of Patagonia at https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/23/opinion/patagonia-environnment-fast-fashion.html

• “I know firsthand the high stakes of low quality. When I started forging climbing equipment and selling it out of the back of my car in the 1950s, I was my own best customer. My dirtbag climber buddies and I wanted stronger pitons and sturdier carabiners to support us as we hung thousands of feet above the Yosemite Valley floor. If the metal were too soft or a joint too weak, the resulting fall would have killed me or one of my friends.  I wanted to stay alive, so I chose quality at every turn, creating products that were simple, versatile and made with the lightest, strongest materials I could find.”
• “People ask me how it has managed to stick around so long when the average life span of a corporation is less than 20 years. I tell them it’s been our unrelenting focus on quality, which includes making things that last and that cause the least amount of harm to our planet.” Quality is smart business. Even during economic downturns, people don’t stop spending. In our experience, instead of wanting more, they value better. Consumers should demand — and companies should deliver — products that are more durable, multifunctional and, crucially, socially and environmentally responsible.”

How does this relate to your practice and the clients you serve?  Do you believe that it’s better to do excellent planning and provide flawless implementation upfront, rather than to try to unwind poor planning and flawed implementation down the road?  The cost for working with the cheapest, least experienced, and perhaps, ethically-challenged professional can be prohibitively and dangerously high.

Many ultra-high net worth clients used all of their available gift/estate and GST exemptions in 2020 or 2021.  For an individual, the exemption increased by $120,000 in 2021, $360,000 in 2022 and is estimated to increase by $860,000 in in 2023.  We can make assumptions for the increases in 2024 and 2025.  What would it look like if we used the increases to fund additional life insurance.
Click here to find out.

“In legacy planning, the “clawback” refers to the additional estate taxes that could be triggered by lifetime gifts if the unified federal gift and estate tax exemption is less at the time of death than at the time of gift. If there is a lower exemption at death, without a special rule, the estate tax rules could recapture and tax the value of the gift that was originally sheltered from gift tax under a higher exemption. While final regulations issued in 2019 eliminated this clawback, the preamble to these final regulations acknowledged that the IRS needed to further consider whether gifts that they deem as not true inter vivos transfers should be excepted from this special rule.”

To read the full report, click here.

“In anticipation of potential tax legislation in 2021, many ultra-high net worth clients took advantage of the large exemption amount to transfer assets outside of their taxable estate. Despite this planning, numerous clients will still have a significant estate tax liability that will need to be funded. Trust-owned life insurance is a helpful planning solution that creates future liquidity outside of client’s taxable estate to help fund this liability.”

An excellent primer in Bloomberg Tax on the benefits of Private Split Dollar.

Click here to read the full article.

“While conventional estate plans focus on a “traditional” family notion of one husband, one wife, and their children, families today often involve far more complex relationships. Thus, modern-day families often present unique planning issues, such as the need to satisfy obligations under marital agreements, the goal to provide simultaneously for both the surviving spouse and children from prior relationships, and the desire to ensure “fair” treatment of children from prior relationships, all while minimizing potential conflicts between the spouse and those same children. The acquisition of life insurance, as well as other “tweaks” to the conventional core plan, can address these objectives.”

To see the full report, click here.

2021 was a strange and challenging year in the estate and tax planning field, particularly life insurance….In the rush to address and mitigate potential consequences before they came into existence, practitioners, advisors, and clients all made decisions and took actions which, in retrospect, may not have been most advisable, were just plain mistakes, or failed to plan for the problems that these actions had potential to cause in the future, regardless of whether any of the concerning factors came to fruition. This article describes many of these “mistakes” which occurred due to rushed planning and may serve as a warning if we are (and we will be) faced with similar situations in the future.

To see the full report, click here. 

September 13, 2021— Yesterday, Finseca got hold of a list of tax increases planned to pay for the $3.5 trillion dollar ‘soft’ infrastructure package. This is an early document, and we expect changes before the bill reaches President Biden’s desk – candidly, it could change as soon as tomorrow.

To see the current details, click here.