2. Leverage today’s low interest rates to substantially reduce your taxable estate. Today’s historically low interest rates provide a unique opportunity to shift minority positions in your business to the next generation over time through the use of a Grantor Retained Annuity Trust (GRAT) or an Intentionally Defective Irrevocable Trust (IDIT). You can lock in a low interest rate for your retained portion, removing greater portions of the profitable, appreciating business value from your taxable estate.

3. Consider a single member limited liability company (LLC) to hold business, investment or recreational property. Individuals, corporations, partnerships and other LLCs are increasingly placing such property as rental real estate, operating divisions and intellectual property in separate single member LLCs to protect personal and other business assets. For federal tax purposes, the single member LLC is considered a “disregarded entity,” so there is no separate income tax return for this entity, making it a cost-efficient and convenient asset protection tool.

4. Structure life insurance ownership to eliminate the estate tax on its death benefits. While life insurance death benefits are generally not subject to income tax, they are subject to estate tax when the deceased insured owns the policy. If the life insurance is purchased by an irrevocable trust, your survivors can receive such benefits free of both income and estate taxes. If you have an existing policy insuring your life, you may transfer it to an irrevocable trust and achieve the same result as long as you survive more than three years from the date of transfer.

5. Give to charity in a tax-efficient manner. There are a number of ways to structure charitable giving, both during life and upon death, to maximize available deductions for income tax and transfer tax. Charitable Remainder Trusts (CRTs) and Charitable Lead Trusts (CLTs) are popular techniques. Private foundations allow you to leave a legacy of charitable giving while showing your survivors the importance of giving back to the community.

6. Name a trust as the beneficiary of your qualified plan or IRA. By naming a trust, designed to comply with certain IRS regulations, as the beneficiary of your retirement plan accounts, the trust beneficiaries generally can stretch out distributions over a beneficiary’s lifetime. Your survivors can thus obtain the advantages of tax-deferred growth while securing the benefits of holding assets in trust.

7. Create a Generation-Skipping or Dynasty Trust. The estate tax tends to erode wealth at each succeeding generation. By placing highly appreciating assets in a trust designed to provide for the security of your children while avoiding the estate tax in one or more generations, you can leave a legacy of trustee-managed wealth for your family that will last long into the future.

8. Execute and fund a revocable trust as the foundation of your estate plan. After your death, the revocable trust can protect the trust assets from a beneficiary’s creditors, divorce judgments and other lawsuits and provide prudent management of assets for young children and grandchildren. It can address “blended” family situations, allowing you to address the needs of your spouse and those of children from a prior marriage, reduce estate taxes for married couples on their combined estates and avoid probate court involvement in the settlement of the estate. Remember, property that passes by will is always probated.

9. Don’t forget to plan for incapacity. Have a Durable Power of Attorney and a Patient Advocate Designation in place in case you are incapacitated through injury, sickness or old age. If you don’t plan ahead in this respect, the Probate Court will need to appoint someone to manage your affairs and make health-care decisions for you, resulting in critical delay, additional expense and inconvenience for family members during an often stressful time.

10. Don’t procrastinate. Many of the techniques designed to reduce estate taxes work to your advantage over time. In fact, the IRS often scrutinizes estate-reduction techniques when done shortly before death. Interest rates will inevitably rise over time, thereby reducing the effectiveness of certain estate planning tools.

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1. Grief that is dazed and speechless is out of fashion: the modern woman mourns her husband loudly and tells you the whole story of his death, which distresses her so much that she forgets not the slightest detail about it. – Bruyere, Jean De La
2. Tears are sometimes an inappropriate response to death. When a life has been lived completely honestly, completely successfully, or just completely, the correct response to death’s perfect punctuation mark is a smile. – Burchill, Julie
3. Never does one feel oneself so utterly helpless as in trying to speak comfort for great bereavement. I will not try it. Time is the only comforter for the loss of a mother. – Carlyle, Jane Welsh
4. It is extraordinary how the house and the simplest possessions of someone who has been left become so quickly sordid. Even the stain on the coffee cup seems not coffee but the physical manifestation of one’s inner stain, the fatal blot that from the beginning had marked one for ultimate aloneness. – Dowell, Coleman
5. The death of a dear friend, wife, brother, lover, which seemed nothing but privation, somewhat later assumes the aspect of a guide or genius; for it commonly operates revolutions in our way of life, terminates an epoch of infancy or of youth which was waiting to be closed, breaks up a wonted occupation, or a household, or style of living, and allows the formation of new ones more friendly to the growth of character. – Emerson, Ralph Waldo
6. The sorrow for the dead is the only sorrow from which we refuse to be divorced. Every other wound we seek to heal — every other affliction to forget: but this wound we consider it a duty to keep open — this affliction we cherish and brood over in solitude. – Irving, Washington
7. Guilt is perhaps the most painful companion of death. – KuBler-Ross, Elisabeth
8. If, as I can’t help suspecting, the dead also feel the pains of separation (and this may be one of their purgatorial sufferings), then for both lovers, and for all pairs of lovers without exception, bereavement is a universal and integral part of our experience of love. – Lewis, C. S.
9. If we could know which of us, darling, would be the first to go, who would be first to breast the swelling tide and step alone upon the other side — if we could know! - Julia Harris
10. Bereavement is a darkness impenetrable to the imagination of the unbereaved. – Murdoch, Iris

There are many more great quotes, we think it really helps in times of loss to look to the words of others that have been through or are going through the same things.  We hope that you all appreciate these words and that you share them with your friends.

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• House plants (several varieties are common)
• Flower arrangements (these are only temporary, but can be uplifting)
• Keepsake plaques (usually these specify the years the loved one lived)
• Wall or Shelf clocks
• Frames pictures (usually of the loved one that passed away)
• Donations (this will help defray the costs of the funeral and ongoing expenses)

Unfortunately, we all find ourselves losing loved ones and while bereavement gifts won’t bring our loved ones back, they do help ease our sense of loss and let us remember that others love us and we are not alone in this World.

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