2023 Fall - Estate Planning Nuggets and Planning Tips

Description

Brought to you by The First National Bank in Sioux Falls, the Sioux Falls Estate Planning Council and SD Continuing Legal Education

This presentation by Marty Shenkman will be a potpourri of practical planning tips and ideas for practitioners that will include discussion of some recent developments and how they might be addressed in practice. The presentation will include discussions regarding the following:

Planning Nuggets and New Developments:  

• A survey of planning ideas and some recent developments.
• Tax reimbursement clauses – suggestions on safer use.
• SLATs: practical and often overlooked planning, funding and structuring and administration of SLATs to enhance the access clients have and increasing the likelihood of the IRS and creditors respecting the plan including an approach that might obviate a reciprocal trust challenge.
• Mass affluent clients ($2-$10M) can benefit from SLATs too! How to apply what is often viewed as only an estate tax reduction technique to lower wealth clients.
• Powers of attorney – an often ignored but vital planning document deserves more attention from special needs planning to 2026 tax planning and more.
• Revocable Trusts – how to tailor them to be more robust later life protective tools to deflect elder abuse, identity theft and more for your aging clients.
• Planning lessons and themes from the Smaldino, Levine and Sorenson cases: adherence to formalities, overlooked reporting and other issues, how to better structure note sale and other transactions and more.
• Kalilkow case.
• Trust decanting – tax and other practical considerations.
• Grantor trust burn – what to do when the client tires of paying income taxes on trust income. It is about a lot more than just trying to turn off grantor trust status.
• How practitioners can practice more defensively given the growing malpractice risks in the estate planning area including recommendations based on an analysis of recent cases. Tips on language to include in engagement letters and billing.
• Recent valuation cases and what they mean to practitioners: Nelson v. Commissioner, CCA 202152018, Daniel R. Baty v. Comm’r, Dematteo v. Comm’r.

Trust Administration

• The essential importance of proper administration of a trust to a plan’s success considering the lessons from recent cases: Smaldino, Levine, Sorensen and Connelly.
• How to organize and address the myriad of documents and steps in every trust plan.
• Using institutional trustees and trust friendly jurisdictions
• Tax reimbursement clauses
• Swap powers
• Powers of appointment
• ….and more.

Tips for Planning Defensively in an Environment of Increasing Risk

• The malpractice environment for estate planners has grown riskier.
• What do recent cases suggest that planners in all disciplines might do to reduce their risks?
• What communications might be sent to clients to protect the practitioner?
• How properly communicating to clients may help their plan succeed based on comments in the recent Levine case.
• How and why collaboration not only helps the client but protects practitioners?
• What might be included in bills, letters, memorandum, and more to increase the likelihood of clients understand the risks inherent in every plan.
• This presentation will focus on practical and actionable steps, not on theory.