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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.

Recently the IRS released proposed regulations under Chapter 14 of the Internal Revenue Code that would severely limit—if not eliminate—the application of valuation discounts, including lack of marketability and minority discounts, to interests in closely held family entities for gift, estate, and generation-skipping transfer tax purposes. If finalized in their current form, the proposed regulations will have a significant impact on future estate planning for high net worth individuals and, potentially, on estate plans which were recently put into place.

Proposed regulations covering the valuation of family controlled entities for transfer tax purposes—12 years in the making—were published by the IRS on August 4, 2016. If newly proposed IRS Regulations are finalized in their current form, nearly all valuation discounts on family controlled entities will be eliminated. Given the December 1st public hearing date on the proposed regulations, there is a brief window of opportunity for families to transfer business and investment assets at a reduced gift tax cost. Now is the time to act.

The long-awaited and much-speculated about regulations to Section 2704 were issued in early August 2016. As issued, the proposed regulations expand the scope and reach of section 2704 to preclude use of various structural techniques to artificially suppress the value of interests in entities transferred by taxpayers or owned by them at death. The IRS is likely to receive a great deal of commentary from the estate planning and valuation communities, respectively. Therefore, the final form of these regulations is difficult to predict at best.