Chipman Mazzucco Emerson Estate Planning and Elder Law

Richard S. Land, Attorney

To help you face your estate planning challenges, we have updated our Basic Estate Planning video presentation to cover the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (effective January 1, 2018) and the SECURE Act (effective January 1, 2020).  You can take a look at the video here (Basic Estate Planning After the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act) or below.

Here is a very brief summary of what the videos cover:

Parts 1 and 2:  No matter where you live (or die), your estate plan can be destroyed if you don’t know the difference between probate property and non-probate property.  We cover this distinction in Part 1.  We also cover what a trust is and how a trust can help accomplish certain estate planning goals:  protecting assets from the beneficiary’s creditors and risks; asset management for a beneficiary who needs management help; estate tax reduction; and more.  We acknowledge that the unfortunate Connecticut estate tax exists (and many other states do not have an estate tax) but, in most cases, we can help with effective workarounds.  Part 2 covers Connecticut and federal estate taxes (also New York estate taxes) including how life insurance death benefits are taxed for estate tax purposes.

Parts 3 and 4:  Your Will can include provisions that reduce or eliminate estate taxes.  Parts 3 and 4 describe such Wills.  Danger: Existing Wills with old estate tax provisions can have the unintended effect of disinheriting a spouse.  We cover how to deal with such a risk.  We also cover new rules allowing one spouse to give his or her federal estate tax exemption to the surviving spouse.  The surviving spouse’s federal estate tax exemption could be more than $11,580,000.  In addition, we cover Will provisions that can protect assets from a beneficiary’s long term care costs.

Parts 5 and 6:  Not all trusts that are designed to save estate taxes are the same.  Part 5 compares the different types of trusts.  As Part 5 ends, we begin a discussion of common estate planning mistakes and Part 6 continues the discussion.

Parts 7 and 8:  These parts cover estate tax and income tax planning for retirement accounts such as 401(k) accounts and IRAs.

Part 9 to Part 13:  These parts include a complete discussion of revocable living trusts with a comprehensive comparison between a plan that uses a revocable trust and a plan that relies on a Will without making use of a revocable living trust.  Part 13 ends with a description of how Connecticut probate court fees are calculated.

Part 14:  This part covers the basic gift tax rules and techniques.

Part 15:  This is the final part and covers gifts of life insurance policies with brief mention of other advanced gift techniques.

We hope our updated basic estate planning videos help you.  If you have questions about any of the estate planning concepts mentioned in the video, please call.

Posted by Richard S. Land, Attorney, Chipman Mazzucco  Emerson LLC, Attorneys at Law, Danbury, CT, 06810, 203-744-1929 x29, rsl@danburylaw.com.

This entry was posted on May 12, 2020 at 1:24 pm and is filed under Estate Tax and Estate Planning Developments, Planning for Disability and Incapacity. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments.

Tags: durable power of attorney, elder law, estate planning, estate tax, incapacity, living trusts, power of attorney, probate, retirement plan, revocable trusts, trust management, wills