Your first home, establishing your career, marriage, a new baby, a teen’s first car, a student going to college, retirement—many of life’s major events can affect not only your life insurance and estate plans but also your property and liability insurance. While insurance may not be top of mind during these memorable moments and key life-stage milestones, failure to make necessary changes to your policies can lead to uncovered losses.
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Although public companies are most often the targets of shareholder claims and class-action suits, not-for-profit and private entities are not immune from litigation. As a director, you could be named personally in claims of fraud or financial mismanagement from which the entity’s indemnification provisions and business structure cannot always protect you. It is important to understand the risk of lawsuits—whether brought by shareholder, employee, governmental body, competitor, customer, or other third parties—and how you can be protected.
For many individuals and families of wealth, there comes a time when they decide to engage in philanthropy in a larger, perhaps more strategic manner. This often occurs as their relationship with wealth matures, and they realize they have an opportunity (or perhaps feel an obligation) to go beyond writing checks to worthy organizations and move toward a deeper engagement in giving that could make a significant impact on the issues they care about. The shift, which can feel overwhelming, can be one of the most rewarding privileges of wealth.
The rules of the game in estate planning have changed. No longer can planners be so focused on the estate tax liability. They now must be equally focused on income taxes. In the past, taxpayers were willing to give up a step-up in basis at death in order to reduce or eliminate estate taxes. That is often no longer a good trade. With a smaller difference between income and estate taxes, taxpayers and planners must now consider the impact of both, especially for those in states with their own high income taxes.
Selling a business can be a long and complicated process. One of the more strenuous and time-consuming aspects of selling a business is the due diligence process. Assisting with a buyer’s due diligence can take a significant amount of resources of your family office or employees of the business. Accordingly, if you plan on selling a business in a few years, one of the next steps should be to conduct pre-sale due diligence.
Data breaches have become an accepted fact of modern business. According to the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse, twenty-nine businesses reported data breaches in August of 2016 alone. No industry was safe. For many organizations, the question now is not “if,” but “when.” This year appears to be on pace to surpass the number of breaches reported last year. With that in mind, there are concrete steps an organization can take to mitigate the cost of a breach that could occur later.
Although surveys vary, it is estimated that one-third of Americans own a gun. Therefore, the probability that a professional fiduciary (whether a trustee or personal representative) will be responsible for handling the sale or transfer of a firearm is relatively high. A fiduciary selling a gun collection faces unique challenges of both valuation and liability. Although it may be a time-consuming task, researching and using various alternative methods can uncover the best price, with care taken to abide by state and federal regulations, and will likely resolve both issues.
When done well, a trustee’s service can have a profoundly positive impact on a family; when done poorly, a trustee’s service can create or exacerbate fissures within a family, dissipate family wealth, create personal liability for the trustee, and create a public spectacle that sullies the family’s good name and reputation. For key employees in family offices, service as a trustee is sometimes part of the job description. The trustee should adhere to the best practices that will serve the family well, fulfill the duties to the beneficiaries, and minimize the personal risks.
Millennials and ultra-high net worth individuals are increasingly seeking to connect with and positively change their communities through investing, and the way capital is currently deployed can no longer support this need. Impact investing, a subset of social finance, represents a paradigm shift, allocating capital for measurable social and environmental impact while still seeking financial returns. It focuses on maximizing stakeholder value rather than concentrating exclusively on shareholder value—in essence, to “do well by doing good.”
As the nation’s population grows older and more Americans are living longer, cognitive impairment of an individual is likely to become a challenge for more and more families. When a family member is diagnosed with conditions such as dementia or Alzheimer’s, it may already be too late to have an up-to-date estate plan in place. The ramifications can be dramatic not just today, but for generations to come. The risk that cognitive challenges will create obstacles for estate planning later in life underlines the value of starting the process early.