Choosing an attorney to represent you is obviously an important task. The decision certainly should notbe made on the basis of advertising alone. The Yellow Pages are filled with ads – all of which say basically the same thing. You should not hire based solely on advertising. Anyone can buy a slick commercial, even if they have never done an estate plan before.

As you already know, the world has lost one of it's greatest talents, Whitney Houston. What you probably don't know however is that she botched her estate plan.

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 there seems to be a little known fact that you can "asset protect" the inheritance you leave to your children in your revocable trust. There are two basic considerations to obtaining the asset protection. The first consideration is to make sure the children do not have a demand right to the assets in their respective continuing trusts. The second is the placement of an independent discretionary trustee 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