On February 10, 2012, Bloomberg Businessweek reported that Romney's plan is to repeal the Federal Estate Tax. They also report that Romney plans to drop the corporate tax from 35% to 25% and cut capital gains. To read more on Romney's proposed tax plans if elected, go to http://www.businessweek.com/news/2012-02-10/romney-said-to-ready-more-detailed-plan-to-overhaul-tax-code.html.

In general, you can deduct legal fees as an ordinary and necessary business expense. The types of legal fees that are deductible include creation and review of contracts, filing a lawsuit or defending a lawsuit for breach of contract, legal assistance to collect on an account, defending an intellectual property right, defending  against lawsuits brought by employees and receiving tax advice. The amount of the bill that can be deducted in the case of tax advice for an estate plan varies.

Well, 2012 is now upon us and we do have some minor changes to report with respect to the Federal Estate Tax Exemption which is indexed for inflation. The 2012 Federal Estate Exemption and Federal Lifetime Gift Exemption are both indexed for $5,120,000 for 2012 with a top tax rate of 35% on the transfer over that amount.

Continuing our discussion on the rationale for creating lifetime asset protection trusts inside your revocable trust, let's turn to the other situations that your children could find themselves in and how these continuing trusts can benefit them.

For some reason it seems to be a little known fact that you can "asset protect" the inheritance you leave to your children. It has two basic elements. The first is to make sure the continuing trusts for the children do not allow for the children to have a demand right to the assets in the trust and the second is to have an independent discretionary trustee in place over each continuing trust.

Watch this video to find out the big mistake my father made in his estate plan and how you can avoid it....http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kY9F9Mu3Rpw.

Reduction in Gift Tax Exclusion May Have a November 23 Effective Date

See Forbes article at http://www.forbes.com/sites/peterjreilly/2011/11/09/reduction-in-gift-tax-exclusion-may-have-a-november-23-effective-date/

UBS Wealth Planning Alert

November 2011

Tax Alert: Potential Changes in the Estate and Gift Tax Landscape in 2011

A rumored reduction in the Gift Tax Exemption has been building. Currently, each US citizen has a lifetime gift tax exemption of $5 million dollars.

A Congressional Super-Committee is strongly considering a change to the current law and may have it passed by month end (by the end of November 2011). From outward appearances, it looks like the Republicans are willing to accept the compromise.

In a recent episode of Gene Simmons Family Jewels (lead singer of the band Kiss) and his lovely wife Shannon were in the office of an estate planning attorney to draw up their estate plan. In this episode, Gene was particularly fixated on death (he also took Shannon to a cemetery to show her the burial plots he had purchased for them both). If you know anything about Mr. Simmons, showing up in an estate planning attorney’s office is probably one of the last places you would expect to find him.