Kentucky Estates: articles on retirement planning
My practice, and the practices of most colleagues and friends who are also trust and estate attorneys, has become busier than any of us ever expected after the 2010 tax act made high estate tax exemptions an (allegedly) permanent part of the landscape. I think one issue, more than any other, has been the key […]
When people in their 30s and 40s think about their earning trajectory through a normal retirement age, they should take into account the tendency for income growth to taper after age 40 in many fields, and the risks of unplanned early retirement, caused by health problems, corporate downsizing, or otherwise. Job loss after age 40 […]
Several months ago I read Cut Adrift: Families in Insecure Times by Marianne Cooper, a Stanford sociologist. Cooper’s chapters on the extremely professionally successful upper middle class and their project of “doing security” were particularly interesting. These families were operating an increasingly unstable career and social environment, and devoted tremendous energy to enhancing their own financial security. […]
In the late 60s and early 70s at Bing Nursery School on Stanford’s campus, Walter Mischel conducted the famous “Marshmallow Experiment” on delayed gratification. Preschoolers were offered a choice between one marshmallow or cookie right away, or two if they waited about 15 minutes. When researchers tracked down study participants as adults, they found that the […]
I believe effective life cycle estate and financial planning is anchored in the Quadrant of Facts, Forecasts, Life Stages, and Unexpected Events. Over the past several weeks, ten posts covered a lot of territory about Facts and Forecasts. This is a pivot point at which we begin exploring planning issues in the first of several Life […]
Our previous post explored a model of the cost of the promise you make to yourself to fund your retirement, but that model omitted a very important real-world risk: volatile equity markets. Most recently, the 2008 stock market crash changed many retirement plans for the worse. A 2009 study by the Urban Institute, “What the 2008 Stock […]
Pause and reflect on what a pension is: income for life after you retire, intended to replace part of all of your employment income. For retirees in the “Greatest Generation,” pensions were common. For a host of reasons (presented well by Jacob Hacker in his 2006 book The Great Risk Shift) structural changes in the American […]
Most people know (at least in the abstract) that choices have consequences. Choices you make to manage your behavioral tendencies (or not) and about your investment costs may have tremendous consequences for when you can retire. I built a model to explore the tradeoffs between retirement age, investment costs, and behavioral tendencies. Like any model, […]
Spy Game (2001) is all about retirement: Nathan Muir’s last day at work at the CIA. Muir (Robert Redford) has a protege, Bishop (Brad Pitt), who’s been thrown into a very unpleasant prison in coastal China. Muir calls his broker and tells him to sell all of his assets, raising $282,000 to bribe a Chinese official […]
In 2010, KYEstates provided coverage here, here, and here regarding creditor protection for inherited IRAs. At that time there was no clear consensus on the degree of protection these accounts enjoyed. Earlier this year, in Clark v. Rameker, 573 U.S. ___ (2014), the Supreme Court resolved a circuit split and delivered bad news for debtors, finding […]
If you are a KYEstates reader in a state where it’s cold in the winter, you have probably seen them: people who seem to live in your own neighborhood and golf at your club, but have a car with a Florida license plate. Who are those people? They’re the lucky ones: the Snowbirds who get a […]
As we approach the Congressional midterm elections (still with no action on the estate tax), one often hears opinions in certain quarters that the government isn’t efficient. Studiously expressing no opinion about these claims generally, KYEstates is pleased to report that they’re untrue in at least one respect: the IRS has become very efficient at […]