Posted by: Administrator
in General Topics on Feb 27, 2010
We are happy to announce that Glen "Chip" Dahlke has returned to the Living Trust Network as a Senior Contributor.
As many of you know, Chip was actively involved in the Living Trust Network from its inception in 2006, contributing many insightful tips and commentaries on personal finances, including the investment of assets in living trusts and qualified retirement plans. Many of his articles continue to be published on our web site to this day.
Now, after a brief hiatus attending to his 110-acre farm in Lyme, Connecticut, his wife's "Ashlawn Farm Coffee" business, and his own investment business known as "Dahlke Financial Group," Chip is back as our Senior Contributor.
Look for Chip's articles here at the Living Trust Network on a regular basis. For those who wish to receive notice of Chip's new articles as they are published, an RSS feed will be available. Chip's first new article, entitled "Investing For The Rest of Us: Charting a course for the future," is now featured on our homepage. Please take a look!
Posted by: Michael P. Pancheri
in Gift Taxes on Nov 14, 2009
There was a time when the IRS insisted that the annual gift-tax exclusion (currently $13,000) would not apply to gifts made directly from a revocable living trust. The theory was that the annual gift-tax exclusion was available only to individuals, and a trust was not an individual.
As a result, many professionals advised their clients to take the property back from their revocable living trust before gifting it to the intended beneficiary, thereby insuring that the annual gift-tax exclusion would apply to the gift.
Some people would question why it would make a difference one way or the other, since the unified credit would shelter the gift from gift taxes in any event. For many people, that's true. However, for those individuals with large estates, once the current unified credit against gift taxes has been exhausted (currently $1 million), the loss of each annual gift-tax exclusion represented a potential tax of roughly 45% of the value of the gift.
Even if the unified credit against gift taxes is not exhausted during the grantor's lifetime, if the gift was made within three years of the grantor's death, the IRS insisted that the value of the gift be brought back into the grantor's estate for estate tax purposes. At that time, the value of the gift was included with all other assets of the grantor and taxed at the appropriate estate tax rate.
We've recognized for some time that our "Ask the Experts" forum needs some kind of a kick-start to get it going. Everyone says that it's very difficult - and a lot of work - to create an active forum. We're finding that to be very true.
We do know, however, that people have lots of questions about wills and trusts and probate - and we also know that people will chit chat away on a forum once they become accustomed to using it. People actually enjoy reading posts and even making their own posts once they get started. Besides being educational, forums are also quite entertaining.
So, we've been at work sprucing up the forums so that they're more user-friendly and more attractive visually. You'll notice that we've added a number of features that do this - for example, we've added the ability to spotlight certain posts and to add avatars, smilies, and other images. We've also added advertisements between some of the posts. Believe it or not, the ads do add visual appeal to the forums because they break up the text.
Now, we're going to introduce a competition to get people to actually do some posting. For the remainder of the year, we're going to offer prizes to 10 people who make the most posts during that period. We don't know yet what the prize will be, one suggestion is Sarah Palin's book that will be released on the 17th of this month. That's a possibility, but we may have a couple of different books that the winners can choose from. So, if you've been holding back, this exciting offer should be enough to get you going.
Staying Current 
