Kentucky Estates: articles about life cycle planning and its estate, trust, and financial planning applications
This week I’ve been reading Claire Tomalin’s Jane Austen: A Life. That’s risky for me to admit, as surveys show the female/male ratio of “Janeites” runs about 25:1. Mockery from readers may be unavoidable, and even deserved. I think one of the most interesting aspects of Tomalin’s biography is how it shows the Austens and […]
Broadly speaking, I have observed Upper Class families use three types of inheritance strategies: deferral, ad hoc gifts, and income streams. Deferral is a traditional strategy: pay to raise and educate your child, and then give them not very much (if anything) until they inherit as your survivor. Ad hoc gifts are transfers for a […]
Although class is discussed frequently and openly in Britain, it makes many of us on this side of the Pond uncomfortable. Even so, class in America has been covered humorously by Paul Fussell, and with great color and insight by the New York Times. Because I am a trust and estates lawyer, my practice offers a fascinating […]
The expense of college for children and grandchildren is a troubling issue for almost all of my clients. I think this is because at an instinctual level, long before crunching any numbers, clients know what the charts below show: college costs have gone truly exponential in the last one and a half generations, far outstripping increases […]
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 […]
If you have been working since the late ‘90s, you have probably collected some great stories about exercising stock options and other equity-based compensation. Some are unqualified success stories, like the time my college roommate’s father pulled up outside the college dorm in a brand-new zippy BMW convertible (top down, naturally), and told us to […]
Noncompetition agreements are a common fact of life for many of the mid- and senior-level executives I represent in estate planning, and for business owner clients with employees. Because noncompetes are such important features of the life cycle estate and financial planning landscape, I sat down with my colleague Rebecca Weis to learn more about […]
In my practice, I have found that a majority of my clients who create significant wealth do so through ownership of a private business or a concentrated stock position in a publicly traded company. What that means for you is that if you haven’t yet started a business or taken an ownership position in one, […]
Whether you’re wealthy or not, and whether your estate planning issues are complicated or simple, if you have a child under age 18, you need a Will, because you should nominate a guardian for your child. The guardian will act for your child (the “ward”) with the range of parental responsibilities and authority you’d have, […]
People often decide between renting or buying a place to live based on preferences and instinct: What do you want to do? If they are incrementally more analytical, they may explore “how much house” they can “afford”. This approach is grounded in capabilities. What can you do? I think the most useful approach to important financial […]
Whether or not to get a prenuptial agreement before getting married isn’t an easy decision. The advisability of a prenup turns in large part on whether the default law that will govern the marriage if it ends by death or divorce is agreeable. If you can live with the default rules, a prenup might not […]
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 […]