Product Description: The most comprehensive -- yet easy to read -- guide to estate planning on the market!
Plan Your Estate covers everything from the basics of wills and living trusts to sophisticated tax-saving strategies. The authors give you straightforward, plain-English explanations of every significant estate-planning option available, so you can make the best decisions for you and those you love.
The book covers:
wills
probate and how to avoid it
living trusts
property-control trusts
naming guardians for children
leaving property to children
estate taxes and how to reduce them
living wills (health care directives)
financial powers of attorney
final arrangements
strategies for business owners
and much more.
The 9th edition is completely updated with the latest federal and state laws, and now covers ethical wills -- a new way to pass on values, beliefs and important personal experiences. Good for all states except Louisiana.
Excellent overview for planning and understanding options This is an excellent overview for those interested in planning for a estate. While a lawyer will still be needed, the general options and considerations will be clearer after reading this book. Recommended for those "nearing" estate time or have relatives with estate planning questions.
Reviewing: "Plan Your Estate" by Attorney Denis Clifford It is that time of year when thoughts turn to taxes. A key part of tax planning is deciding how to manage your estate. This book, part of NOLO's "Personal Finance Essentials" is one of many books on the subject. As noted in the introduction it is aimed at five basic concepts: "leaving property, providing for young children, planning for incapacity, avoiding probate and reducing taxes."
The first chapter looks at setting goals for your estate planning. That is done by determining what you own, who you want to give it to, how to avoid probate now that they have explained what that is, the necessity of a will, tax situations, etc. This chapter gives a brief snapshot of a variety of situations which should cover most people and the basics involved.
Chapter two dives into situations that are difficult at best. Resolving family conflict is key and old sibling rivalries and other issues may rise again and threaten your planning. That possibility along with dealing with taking care of special needs children, multiple marriages, cohabitation, disinheriting family members and more are covered. Most of this advice seems to be generic, common sense stuff, with little detail. As a parent of special needs children, I was very disappointed in the very brief discussion on the topic and found it nearly worthless despite the reference to one point later in the book.
Chapter three covers the rules for property ownership for married couples. Texas is a community property state, as noted in the chapter, and as such that means that both my wife and I share ownership in something even if only one name is on the title or deed. We also incur the debt load equally and the income as long as we are living together. The authors go into great detail by definitions and example illustrating what is community property and what is separate property. They also illustrate rules for different states and how moving from one state to another can and will change things.
Chapter four covers how to inventory what have you have. You need to figure out what you own, what you owe, and what your net worth is. This is a fairly straight forward deal that you should be doing anyway as you work on your taxes. The authors make the point to count everything (including frequent flyer miles), to plan for your cyber accounts and groups, and keep good records. To that last point, a number of mostly blank form pages are included so that you can list your property and determine net worth.
"Your Beneficiaries" is the theme of chapter five. Over eleven pages, this chapter covers the types of beneficiaries, what you can do with them, and various possibilities and outcomes including disinheritance and no-contest clauses.
Chapter six returns again to the topic of children and setting things up for them. Whether you want your spouse to be in charge, a trust, want to make educational investments for college, etc are all covered along with numerous other situations. Like most of the chapters in this book, this complicated subject is skimmed lightly to give the reader a working knowledge basis to build from but not much more than the absolute basics.
Wills come next and the many types are defined, explained as are their limitations. Chapter seven also covers whether or not you need an explanatory letter with your will and how to best write one. What happens to your will upon a divorce is also briefly covered.
Chapter eight covers probate and how to avoid it. In most cases, one does want to avoid probate but the authors also consider when probate would be best. At eight pages of information, this is one of the shortest chapters in the book.
Living trusts and all their many varieties and ramifications are considered in chapter nine. After you create one, you must keep it up to date and this chapter address that part of the issue as well.
Chapter ten considers the idea of joint tenancy and its many complications. Simplifying greatly, this is when co-own something and do so to avoid probate later. Primarily this is housing and or land. Over eighteen pages, the authors consider the subject and explain how it works, positives and negatives, and how it can affect your estate planning.
Maybe you want to set up something that will pay certain accounts upon death. That concept is covered in chapter eleven along with how to set up transfer-on-death deeds for real estate.
Chapter twelve covers the concept of "life insurance" and all its many types, rules, taxes, etc.
Retirement benefits such as 401 k's, Roth IRA's etc get the same brief overview in chapter thirteen.
There are state law exemptions to probate and those are covered in chapter fourteen. California, New York, Florida and my state of Texas, are highlighted with very brief explanations.
Chapter fifteen covers the thorny issue of estate taxes. Will the estate owe taxes, how to calculate them, how to redeem them, etc are all covered both from a federal and state level.
Chapter sixteen covers the same issue; from a "gift" angle. It defines what a gift is, how to value a gift, how to use gifts to reduce estate taxes, etc.
Trusts are covered in the next several chapters with chapter seventeen giving "An Overview of Ongoing Trusts." As noted, this chapter is an overview and explains what they are and how they work. Chapter eighteen covers the subject of "Bypass Trusts" and how they can help reduce the tax bill. Chapter nineteen looks at other tax saving trusts for married people and primarily considers to "Qualified Terminable Interest Property" trust also known as QTIP. Chapter twenty delves into the various charitable trusts and how they work. Chapter twenty-one continues the trust angle with numerous other types of trusts such as "Grantor-Retained Annuity Trusts, Grantor-Retained Income trusts" and many more.
Chapter twenty-two explains how one can disclaim property that has been assigned to you through inheritance. Like everything else, there are rules and procedures as well as reason to do this.
Chapter twenty-three returns to the idea of trusts and explains how to combine them. Chapter twenty-four considers trusts for the second or more marriage. More controls for property are considered in chapter twenty-five.
Incapacity and how to have things setup to make medical and financial decisions is the theme of twenty-six. That naturally leads into death, body and organ donations, funerals and all the rest of it in chapter twenty-seven.
Do you have a family business? That finally gets covered in chapter twenty-eight and how to deal with it. That naturally leads into the need of lawyers which is covered in twenty-nine.
So finally you have your estate plan. What to do next is the theme of chapter thirty regarding all of the many things you have created.
Then, after all the planning is done, everything is set up and now comes crunch time. The death has happened. Chapter thirty-one addresses what has happened and how to follow through on all that planning.
Chapter thirty-two considers eight widely different scenarios of people needing estate planning and how they should set up things based on their particular situations.
An eleven page glossary of terms, various appendices on tax rules, a twenty five page index, and a couple of ads for other NOLO products and services bring this 552 page book to a close.
Released last April this informative book meets the five goals set out in the introduction. Straight forward and simple to read, it gives the reader a basic working knowledge of the subject matter and serves as a good reference point or resource guide. Like any book on the subject, the information in it is subject to change and depending on the complexity of your situation it might be best to consult with a professional. Still, for the market and knowledge base this book is aimed for, it does the job well and is a very good source of info.
Kevin R. Tipple (copyright) 2009
"By The Light Of The Moon" The Carpathian Shadows Volume 2
It contains helpful information. I have been thinking more about planning for a estate, investing in a trust, and buying life insurance after becoming a parent. This book contains some good basic information which is exactly what I was looking for. Good buy!
Excellent Overview of a Complicated Topic If you are like most Americans and do not expect to have a multi-million dollar estate when you die, then this isn't the book for you. Just max out your IRA and 401(k), and read a book about living trusts. (However, you might still be interested to learn how many ways the super-rich can circumvent estate taxes by legal artifice.)
If you do have a substantial estate, then this book is a great place to start. If nothing else, it tells you whether or not you need a lawyer. Even if you do, I would still recommend reading this book cover-to-cover, so that you fully understand your estate plan and are aware of the alternatives, as well as of the implications of tax law changes.
It's a shame that laymen have to waste their brainpower worrying about such unnecessary complexity as financial estate planning, but so long as the majority suffer from the delusion that this is an effective means of taxation, we're stuck with it. This book will guide you through the complexity.
A great book to help you learn how to sensibly plan the transfer of your wealth at your death and minimize any estate tax bite!
This is a wonderful book on estate planning that focuses on legal and practical issues. I loved it. As I read through it I did not see any inaccuracies in the law or in the subject matter. I especially enjoyed reading about the different options one has regarding how to leave property to minor children. And it includes a thorough discussion on the ways to save on estate taxes.
This book is written for the nonlawyer. And it is not designed to cover in detail ancillary subjects related to estate planning. It is applicable to all states (except Louisiana) and DC. It will be useful for people with estates of any amount. But because of its comprehensive nature I seriously doubt that people with insignificant estates will want to read it. There are other less comprehensive books those people should read. There is no reason to get overwhelmed about estate planning when there is no need to do so.
This book does not provide prepackaged estate plans to be used as templates for readers. Subjects not covered are elder law, retirement planning, and financial planning. However, I think Chapter 13 concerning Retirement Benefits came pretty close to being a superficial chapter on retirement planning.
I would have liked the book better if chapters 3 and 10 had been combined. And I realize that most estate planning authors include retirement planning and incapacity planning in their books. But I view those subjects as being separate and apart from estate planning and should have been left out of this book. Ergo, I'd get rid of chapters 13 and 26. Maybe they could be the subject of another Nolo book? The coverage of state law exemptions regarding probate seemed out of place to me, too. I don't think the intended audience of this book really cares about that material.
My favorite chapters were 15 to 23. Understanding estate and gift taxes and how to reduce or eliminate them is what estate planning is mostly about. And it was wonderful seeing Chapter 22 (Disclaimers) and Chapter 28 (Small Business Owner issues). These subjects are ignored in most estate planning books.
I thought the author went a little heavy on being anti-Probate throughout the text. Probate has its good points and its bad. I would have liked the book better if the author had just stuck to the facts and not gone overboard giving his slant on the topic. 5 stars!
Anything Goes Trivia
Megaton Man
Trevor
