The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act made many changes in tax law and below I discuss three major estate planning implications.
The headline item is that the estate tax exemption is now $22.4 million for married couples and $11.2 million for single people. This means that the federal estate tax will be paid by even fewer Nebraskans. (But note that the Nebraska state inheritance tax is still the law. )
Many couples planned for a bypass trust when the taxable estate amounts were much lower. That made sense at the time. But with the new higher estate tax exemptions maybe the plan should be revisited. When the second spouse in a bypass trust plan ...
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The Facts from the Editors of BloombergView
"By 2050, the U.S. will have almost 90 million people aged 65 and over, and more than half will need long-term care at some point. Yet only a sliver of that group can afford the premiums insurers require. As of 2015, private insurance covered less than 10 percent of the U.S. spending on long-term care -- and the private market has been shrinking."
"Medicare covers only a short period of care after a person has been hospitalized. That leaves Medicaid, the state-administered program for the poor. But it kicks in only after people have burned through their assets -- precisely the outcome that insurance is meant to avoid. The paperwork ...
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Big Increases in Long Term Care Insurance Policies
The Wall Street Journal has an update article this week on the financial health of the long-term care insurance industry, detailing recent rate increases and reminding us that even with contraction of this specialized market for sellers of new policies, there are still more than 7 million policies affected by the inadequate pricing structure issues.
Steep rate increases that many policyholders never saw coming are confronting them with an awful choice: Come up with the money to pay more—or walk away from their coverage.
“Never in our wildest imagination did we consider that the company would double the premium,” says Sally Wylie, 67, a ...
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