If you’ve worked a lifetime to build a large estate, you undoubtedly would like to leave a lasting legacy to your children and future generations. Educating your children about saving, investing and other money management skills can help keep your legacy alive.

Teaching Approaches

There’s no one right way to teach your children about money. The best way depends on your circumstances, their personalities and your comfort level.

If your kids are old enough, consider sending them to a money management class. For younger children, you might start by simply giving them an allowance in exchange for doing household chores. This helps teach them the value of work. Opening a savings account or a CD, or buying bonds, can help teach kids about investing and the power of compounding.

If you dream of spending your golden years in a tropical paradise, a culture-rich European city or another foreign locale, it’s important to understand the potential tax and estate planning implications. If you don’t, you could be hit with some unpleasant surprises.

Avoiding the Pitfalls

If you’re a citizen of the United States, U.S. taxes will apply even after you move to another country. So, if your estate is large, you might be subject to gift and estate taxes in your new country and in the United States (possibly including state taxes if you maintain a residence in a U.S. state). You also could be subject to estate taxes abroad even if your estate isn’t large enough to be subject to U.S. estate taxes. In some cases, you can claim a credit against U.S. taxes for taxes you pay to another country, but these credits aren’t always available.

When married couples neglect to prepare an estate plan, state intestacy laws step in to help provide financial security for the surviving spouse. It may not be the plan they would have designed, but at least it offers some measure of financial security. Unmarried couples, however, have no such backup plan. Unless they carefully spell out how they wish to distribute their wealth, a surviving life partner may end up with nothing.

Marital Advantages

Because intestacy laws offer no protection to an unmarried person who wishes to provide for his or her partner, it’s essential for unmarried couples at minimum to employ a will or living trust. But marriage offers several additional estate planning advantages that unmarried couples must plan around, such as:

Estate planning and investment risk management go hand in hand. After all, an estate plan is effective only if you have some wealth to transfer to the next generation. One of the best ways to reduce your investment risk is to diversify your holdings. But it’s not unusual for affluent people to end up with a significant portion of their wealth concentrated in one or two stocks.

There are many ways this can happen, including the exercise of stock options, participation in equity-based compensation programs, or receipt of stock in a merger or acquisition.

Sell the Stock

To reduce your investment risk, the simplest option is to sell some or most of the stock and reinvest in a more diversified portfolio. This may not be an option, however, if you’re not willing to pay the resulting capital gains taxes, if there are legal restrictions on the amount you can sell and the timing of a sale, or if you simply wish to hold on to the stock.

Now that the gift and estate tax exemption has reached a record high of $11.18 million (for 2018), it may seem that gifting assets to loved ones is less important than it was in previous years. However, lifetime gifts continue to provide significant benefits, whether your estate is taxable or not.

Let’s examine three reasons why making gifts remains an important part of estate planning:

The annual gift tax exclusion allows you to give up to $15,000 per recipient ($30,000 if you “split” gifts with your spouse) tax-free without using up any of your gift and estate tax exemption. In addition, direct payments of tuition or medical expenses on behalf of your loved ones are excluded from gift tax.

There’s no law that says you can’t prepare your own estate plan. And with an abundance of online services that automate the creation of wills and other documents, it’s easy to do. But unless your estate is small and your plan is exceedingly simple, the pitfalls of do-it-yourself (DIY) estate planning can be many.

Dotting the i’s and Crossing the t’s

A common mistake people make with DIY estate planning is to neglect the formalities associated with the execution of wills and other documents. Rules vary from state to state regarding the number and type of witnesses who must attest to a will and what, specifically, they must attest to.

Also, states have different rules about interested parties (that is, beneficiaries) serving as witnesses to a will or trust. In many states, interested parties are ineligible to serve as witnesses. In others, an interested-party witness triggers an increase in the required number of witnesses (from two to three, for example).

No matter how diligently you prepare, your estate plan can quickly be derailed if you or a loved one requires long-term home health care or an extended stay at a nursing home or assisted living facility.

The annual cost of long-term care (LTC) can reach as high as six figures, and this expense isn’t covered by traditional health insurance policies, Social Security, or Medicare. So it’s important to have a plan to finance these costs, either by setting aside some of your savings or purchasing insurance.

LTC Insurance

An LTC insurance policy supplements your traditional health insurance by covering services that assist you or a loved one with one or more activities of daily living (ADLs). Generally, ADLs include eating, bathing and dressing.

Irrevocable trusts can allow for the smooth, tax-advantaged transfer of wealth to family members. But there is a drawback: When you set up an irrevocable trust, you must relinquish control of the assets placed in it. What you can control is who will eventually oversee distribution of the assets after your death. That is, you can appoint the trustee. But if you aren’t completely confident that the trustee will carry out your wishes, you might want to appoint a trust protector, too.

Trust Protector Duties

A trust protector is to a trustee what a corporate board of directors is to a CEO. A trustee manages the trust on a day-to-day basis. The protector oversees the trustee and weighs in on critical decisions, such as the sale of closely held business interests or investment transactions involving large dollar amounts.

There is virtually no limit to the powers you can confer on a trust protector. For example, you can enable a trust protector to replace a trustee, to appoint a successor trustee or a successor trust protector, and to approve or veto investment or beneficiary distribution decisions. He or she can also resolve disputes between trustees and beneficiaries.

If you have a child or other family member with a disabling condition that requires long-term care or prevents (or will prevent) the individual from supporting him- or herself, consider establishing a special needs trust (SNT). Also known as a supplemental needs trust, an SNT allows you to enhance a family member’s quality of life without jeopardizing eligibility for government benefits, such as Medicaid or Supplemental Security Income (SSI).

An SNT Primer

An SNT is an irrevocable trust designed to supplement, rather than replace, government assistance. Generally, the trust is funded by someone other than the beneficiary, though in certain instances a beneficiary’s assets may be used to fund the trust.

To preserve eligibility for government benefits, the beneficiary can’t have access to the funds, and the trust must be prohibited from providing for the beneficiary’s “support.” That means it can’t be used to pay for medical care, food, clothing, shelter or anything else covered by Medicaid or SSI, such as the basic medical care provided by those programs.

It may be difficult to contemplate, but funeral arrangements are a critical component of your estate plan. Failing to clearly communicate your wishes for the disposition of your remains can lead to tension, disputes, and even litigation among your family members during what is already a difficult time.

Issues to Address

The methods for expressing these wishes vary from state to state, and may include a provision in your will, language in a health care proxy or power of attorney, or a separate form specifically designed for this purpose.

Whichever method you use, it should, at a minimum, state:

• Whether you prefer burial or cremation,
• Where you wish to be buried or have your ashes interred or scattered (and any other special instructions), and
• The person you’d like to be responsible for making these arrangements. Some people also request a specific funeral home.