Wall St. Journal: “Inherited IRAs don't work like regular IRAs. If you inherit an IRA from anyone other than your husband or wife, you can't roll it into your own IRA. And you can't consolidate IRAs you inherit from different people into one account.”
Fox10TV.com: “Melanie Billings appears to have covered her tracks with a will. But attorneys say it's not valid. The last will and testament of Melanie Billings was placed on file this week, at the Escambia County Probate Office. Attorneys for the family said Byrd didn't even leave behind a will. . . . But the family's attorney, Kramer Litvak, says the court doesn't have the power to honor Melanie's requests.”
Professor Bridget J. Crawford of the Pace University School of Law and Professor Mitchell Gans of Hofstra University School of Law article focuses on
the federal estate and gift tax treatment of copyright termination rights. The right of a creative individual to terminate prior copyright transfers serves to protect against economic exploitation. Once a copyright’s value has been established in the marketplace, the author (or the author’s heirs) enjoy a ‘second look' at the gift, sale, license or other transfer of a copyright. But copyright termination rights – intended to enhance the economic well-being of authors and artists – undermine estate-planning strategies available to owners of other types of property. There is no policy justification for such discrimination, and so this article proposes legislative changes that would level the playing field for wealth transfer tax purposes.
Probate Lawyer Blog: “The highly publicized estate battles of several deceased celebrities have cast a bright spotlight on the importance of having the proper estate planning. Although mega-rich celebrities seem to be affected overwhelmingly by these brutal family squabbles, the new book. ‘Trial & Heirs: Famous Fortune Fights!‘ is designed to help every family, regardless of income level, avoid the financial pitfalls that drained bank accounts and created huge family rifts for the dozens of superstars profiled in the book.”
Wall St. Journal: “In the arcane netherworld of estate planning, thicketed with acronyms like SCINs, GRATs and IDGTs, and under the peculiar rules of the Internal Revenue Service, low interest rates enable you to transfer more wealth to your heirs tax-free. On top of that, you can buy an unusual bond specifically designed to protect your heirs from losing money if rates rise. So, with yields near lows, now is the time to stop moaning about the lack of income and to start turning rock-bottom interest rates to your advantage. If your children are about to borrow money and you think they are a good credit risk, you might wish to be their banker yourself.”
Baltimore Sun: The newspaper reprints its 1849 obituary for the famous American poet and author Edgar Allen Poe. The story also includes other news in the same newspaper issue.
University of Louisville – Louis D. Brandeis School of Law professor James T.R. Jones' article entitled “Body, Body, Who Gets the Body? The Resolution of Bodily Remains Cases” discusses fights over the remains of deceased people.
What do celebrity Anna Nicole Smith; Godfather of Soul James Brown; baseball immortals Ted Williams and Kirby Puckett; artist Mark Rothko; some United States service members killed in the Iraq War; and even the Reverend and Mrs. Billy Graham have in common? All have been the objects of disputes over who controls final disposition of their mortal remains. Those, in turn, have brought into public scrutiny an ancient legal issue – who decides the place and method of disposal of the bodies of the dead. From antiquity, the law was ordinarily careful to honor the written or oral directions of the deceased. If a decedent did not express a preference, then burial was determined by the surviving spouse, and if there were none by the next of kin.
The abstracted article reviews the various disputes involving those listed above, as well as some less famous individuals. It concludes attorneys strongly should encourage their clients to state, either in their wills or other written documents, their choice for burial arrangements. Lacking that, they at least orally should indicate their desires on that subject to their next of kin. Doing so can avoid unseemly post-mortem disputes which can turn what should be a solemn and dignified process into a circus-like sideshow event.
The Probate Lawyer Blog: “The will of the late Senator Edward Kennedy was filed with a Massachusetts probate court late last week, providing a peek behind the curtain of the famed Kennedy family. Kennedy died on August 25, 2009, from brain cancer, at age 77. He was survived by his wife of 17 years, Victoria, his three children, and two step-children. Here is a copy of his will, courtesy of FOX TV in Boston: Download Ted Kennedy's will.”
The Trust Advisor Blog: “Nevada’s Financial Institutions Division, the state agency that supervises trust companies, and its Commissioner George E. Burns can celebrate a long fought victory for promoting major trust company regulatory reforms and carrying them through the legislature to the Governors’ desk. The new law, Nevada Senate Bill SB-310, provides for $1 million in capital to be posted, a 330% increase in the requirement needed to license and maintain a retail trust company in the state.”
Americans love their pets. Arizona and forty-one other states authorize the creation of a trust for the benefit of animals. The purpose of a pet trust is to provide funds to pay for the care of pets after the death or disability of the trustmaker(s). Pet trusts usually provide that when the last animal dies, the balance of the funds allocated to the pet trust goes to loved ones or to charity.
I prepare pet trusts for my Arizona estate planning clients who want to insure that their pets are cared for. Most of the time pet trusts are created as part of a revocable living trust.
Two top trust advisors explain why celebrities, including Michael Jackson, often die with little or no legacy planning.
Why do so many celebrities drop the ball and pass away with no will or estate plan in place?
Michael Jackson did have some plan in place. Based on what I learned there are some positives about what he did, but there are more lessons from what he appears to have not done. The problem in Jackson’s case and often common amongst celebrities is that they seem to be involved with managers, lawyers, accountants that come to them and are referred to them through their own contacts rather than getting to find known, trusted, competent and well-respected advisors that can offer a client better choices.
Dr. Kent Sepkowitz, an infectious-disease specialist at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York City, has a thought-provoking article in Newsweek about dying at home vs. dying in a hospital.
As a doctor at a cancer hospital, I'm often asked about death—not the spiritual side of it, but the practical. Specifically, people ask me if it is better to die in a hospital or at home. Until recently I had always voted for death at home, given its promise of relative serenity. I still think it's better. But a friend's recent experience with his elderly father reminded me that hospitals, despite their noise and hurry, still do a few things well in those difficult last moments.
In this article Professor Charles P. Kindregan, Jr., of the Suffolk University Law School examines the law applicable to using sperm and eggs from deceased people to “create” children after death. The author examines
the difficult legal problems created by the growing practice of using the cryopreserved gametes of deceased persons to conceive a posthumous child. The law has long recognized the legal parental status of a man whose fetus is in utero in his wife's pregnancy at the time of the father's death, but developments in reproductive science has now made it possible to conceive a child after either a parents' death. This has been made more complicated by the use of assisted reproduction by unmarried persons, its growing use by same-sex couples and the developing marketplace for stored sperm, eggs and embryos. The science of preserving sperm or embryos.
One of the topics I discuss every month in my free class called “Estate Planning 101” is estate plannning mistakes of the rich and famous. One of the best examples why you need a will or a trust to properly dispose of your property is Marilyn Monroe. For more about Marilyn's estate planning mistakes, see this summary by “My Pink Lawyer.”
Wall St. Journal: “For nearly 20 years, John Dotson planned to spend eternity at Block 29L, Lot 58, Site 1DD at Parklawn Memorial Park in Rockville, Md. Heaven will have to wait. Plagued by a series of misfortunes at home, from job loss to multiple illnesses, Mr. Dotson has decided to put the double plot he had bought for himself and his wife up for sale. “Things got really tight,” he says, and his wife has come around to the idea of cremation. He purchased the plot in 1990 for about $1,500, and though the cemetery now values it at $4,555, Mr. Dotson says he would gladly unload it for around $2,800.”
Gayatri Devi was a very rich Indian princess who personified glamor. She partied with the rich and famous, but her death caused a grubby struggle over her estate.
She was once named by Vogue magazine as one of the world's 10 most beautiful women, the third wife of a Rajasthan prince who counted British royalty and Jackie Onassis among her friends. During the summer months that she spent every year in London's Knightsbridge she would mingle with aristocracy, while back home in India's “pink city”, she would host parties on her lawn for the likes of Mick Jagger and Michael Caine.
But the death of Gayatri Devi, the third wife of the last official Maharajah of Jaipur, has reignited a bitter dispute in the royal family over assets worth perhaps £250m which include fabulous palaces, jewels and paintings. It is a fight that has pitched grandson against step-uncle and half-brother against half-brother – an unseemly row that has reverberated around this desert city where she lived a life in the style of another age.
The dispute within the Jaipur royal family is extraordinarily labyrinthine and multi-layered, but in its essence it pitches Gayatri Devi's grandchildren against two of her step-children.
Dr. Roberta Temes' article called “How to Write a Eulogy” covers a lot of informative ground. The bereavement counselor's article will help anybody who has the honor to give a eulogy.
Some basic asset protection steps for physicians and nonphysicians too.
If you have a loved one who is disabled or has special needs, you should read this article called “Introduction to Special Needs Planning.”
Planning for individuals with disabilities or special needs, is complex and requires great care. It is an area of the law that is fraught with dangerous misunderstandings. This article will provide an overview of planning for those with special needs.
One source of misunderstanding is that many assume that the only element of special needs planning is the use of a special needs trust (“SNT”). While an essential component to special needs planning, a special needs trust is only one factor of the planning.