Category Archives: Estate Planning

Estate Planning Facts. Last Will and Testaments versus Living Trusts. Estate Taxes. Gift Taxes. Inherited IRAs. Guardians for minor children. Pet Trusts. Funeral Agents. Avoiding Probate. Get Your Affairs In Order.

Stieg Larsson died with no will

Stieg Larsson, the man who wrote the milenium trilogy including the novel, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, died suddenly in 2004 at the age of 50. At the time of his death, he was not yet famous and he was living modestly with his partner, Eva Gabrielsson. In fact, they had been living together in Sweden for 32 years.

Larsson spent his career investigating rightwing extremism and received many death threats. He feared that getting married would make them an even bigger target. Despite that, he and Eva finally set a date for the ceremony but Larsson died before it could take place.

The couple had talked about setting up a company in which the two of them would share all of their assets as well as any money earned for writing books and articles. The company would provide that if one of them died, the other one would get everything. Because of this plan, Larsson felt that a will would be unnecessary and so never prepared one. But the company was not set up before Larsson’s death.

Sweden has no provision in their law for inheritance by common-law spouses so when Larsson died without a will, his brother and father inherited everything he owned, including the rights to his books and the profits that the 50 million copies sold made.

In 2007, the family gave Gabrielsson ownership of the modest apartment in which she and Larsson had lived and offered her $2.75 million. She turned down the offer because she wants control of the estate so she can manage the handling of the books, including movie and other publication rights. There is a partial manuscript for a 4th book in the series; since she supposedly helped Larsson write the trilogy and the manuscript is in her possession, she could finish the novel but she refuses to hand it over to Larsson’s family.

If only Larsson had written a will, settlement of the estate could have been handled smoothly and in a timely manner. Instead, in 2012 (more than 8 years later), the dispute is still going on.

Don’t put yourself in this position. Make sure you have a will so your estate will go to the person you want it to….not the one the government dictates. For more information about this topic, go to diesmart.com.

Do you want to live or die in New Jersey?

Several years ago after my dad died in New Jersey, my brother and I were shocked when we realized how much money we were going to have to pay to the state in inheritance and estate taxes. The percentage was huge, especially compared to almost any other state in the US. Evidently, we were not alone in being shocked by New Jersey’s tax rules.

According to a study recently commissioned by Charles Steindel, chief economist of the New Jersey Department of the Treasury (and former senior vice president of the New York Federal Reserve Bank), 25,000 people moved away from New Jersey between 2004 and 2009. Why? In 2004, the state’s highest income tax rate was raised from 6.37% to 8.97% for those making $500,000 or more, and in 2009 a one year 10.75% tax rate was assessed on those making $1 million or more.

In addition to such high income tax, New Jersey is one of only two states (Maryland is the other) with both a state estate tax and a state inheritance tax; this is a problem for those who would like to leave at least the majority of their wealth to their loved ones when they die.

Steindel also conducted a survey of subscribers to the state’s online newsletter Tax Notes, which keeps professionals such as financial advisers, accountants and attorneys up to date on changes in law, rules and court decisions governing tax matters. Subscribers include advisers to high-wealth clients.

More than half of the respondents said that clients had recently left or expressed interest in leaving the state. Respondents said the top three reasons that clients gave for leaving were state income taxes (85.4 percent), local property taxes (77 percent) and estate taxes (67 percent). The next two reasons most-often cited were retirement (47.6 percent) and housing costs (43.7 percent).

So if you live in New Jersey and you have any assets, consider moving to a more tax friendly, or non-taxing, state like Florida.

Digital Assets – Few Laws Legislate Access to Them after Death

If you own digital assets like a Facebook page or a Google email account, what happens to them when you die? Assuming that your next of kin knows your passwords, he or she can easily delete them. However, if your passwords are not available, shutting down these accounts can prove problematic. Each email or social media company has specific rules governing the disposition of its accounts and refuses to vary from those rules. Some allow an executor or next of kin with suitable proof of death to close an account. Others do not, making this writer wonder if those accounts will just float around cyberspace forever.

Many people feel that there should be laws governing all digital assets in the same way that other personal property is currently legislated. However, even though digital assets have become a big part of our lives, there are only five states that have even begun to legislate what happens to them after your death – Connecticut, Rhode Island, Indiana, Oklahoma and Idaho.

Here’s a summary of what the current laws cover:

1. Connecticut’s law, enacted in2005, only covers email. That’s not too surprising considering that the explosion of social networking sites hadn’t occurred when the bill was being formulated. Facebook didn’t start until 2004, when it was launched as a site for use only by students attending specific colleges and Twitter began in 2006. The law states that an email service provider must give the executor or administrator of the estate access to or copies of the contents of the account if the deceased lived in Connecticut at the time of his death.

2. Rhode Island, in its 2007 law, also limited itself to email and is very similar to Connecticut’s.

3. Indiana’s law focuses on electronically stored documents of the deceased. This could include email as well as many other digital assets. The 2007 law says that the “custodian” of the electronically stored documents will provide to the personal representative of the deceased’s estate (if the deceased was living in Indiana at the time of death) access to or copies of any stored documents or information.

4. Oklahoma’s 2010 law is much more comprehensive. It says that the executor or administrator of an estate will have the power to “take control of, conduct, continue, or terminate any accounts of a deceased person on any social networking website, any microblogging or short message service website or any email service websites.”

5. Idaho’s law, which became effective in 2011, is virtually identical to that of Oklahoma.

On January 5, 2012, Senator John Wightman of Nebraska introduced a bill in his state legislature that would be similar to that of Oklahoma and Idaho. However, according to Wightman, the methodology of how the government would access account information and forward it to an estate representative has not yet been determined. In addition, several people have asked whether anyone but the owner of an online account should have the right to view and control its content. Wightman agrees that the bill may have to “be modified in some way to take account of the privacy issues as to whether or not they’ll be able to view the content.”

Why do you think so few states have tackled this issue so far? Do you think your state should have legislation that would control access to your digital assets after your death?

To find out more about digital assets and what currently happens to them when someone dies, pick up a copy of our book, Grave Robbers…How to Prevent Identity Theft of the Deceased, or check out the information at https://diesmart.com/

Social Security numbers – will online access be cut off?

Last week, Representative Sam Johnson of Texas introduced a bill in the House of Representatives that, if passed, will limit access to Social Security numbers available online.

The act, entitled “Keeping IDsSafe Act of 2011” (KIDS Act), is intended to end online access to the Social Security Death Master File. This file currently enables anyone to easily locate the Social Security number of a deceased person. The File has been used for more than ten years by identity thieves to, among other things, file bogus tax returns to the IRS and collect refunds.

The bill was introduced two days after senators met with the Social Security Administration Commissioner, Michael Astrue, to ask the agency to limit information currently released in the death file.

As reported in a recent Scripps Howard News Service article, the need for access to this file to be limited was graphically illustrated when the parents of Benny Watters of Lake Forest, Illinois filed a tax return in August of this year. Benny died at age 5 in September 2010 and the Watters tax return was rejected. Why? Someone else had stolen the boy’s identity and claimed him as a dependent!

There have been recent news reports that say the IRS flagged 350,000 potentially fraudulent 2010 tax returns requesting $1.25 billion in refunds using information gathered about the dead.

The bill introduced by Johnson would limit access to the death file to law enforcement. Tax administrators and government researchers.

To find out more about this topic and other online identity thefts, check out “Grave Robbers…How to Stop the Identity theft of the Deceased.”

When I Go Away: Getting Your Digital Affairs in Order

I just read an article which talks about the need to leave information about your online accounts so your heirs will know what they have to deal with after you die. It’s well worth reading for the information it provides. What it doesn’t tell you is exactly what you have to do to close out or memorialize those accounts. Grave Robbers, our book about how to prevent identity theft of the deceased, does. In addition, there’s information on our site about how to handle the most popular digital sites.