Lawyers prepare California trusts for a variety of reasons.  A Los Angeles trust attorney can work with you to determine what type of estate planning is correct for you.

One benefit of a trust, over will based planning, is that there is privacy.  When a Will is probated, it is made a public record.  Living trusts are private unless someone files a lawsuit.

California trusts can be designed to protect the inheritance of children from creditors, predators, divorce, and themselves.  Thus, we can protect a child from his/her own bad decisions!

When there are younger children or beneficiaries, trusts can protect their inheritance until they obtain an appropriate age.  This is especially true if the child is under age 18, but frequently parents do not want their children to receive their entire inheritance until they are age 30 or above.

Irrevocable Trusts can also be created for charitable purposes; tax planning; and asset protection.

If you think you may benefit from a California trust, and you are in Southern California, please contact our office.

Uncle Sam taxes those with an estate above two million dollars at their death.  In a sense, this is double (if not triple) taxation, as people are taxed annually on their income.

It is double taxation because the estate tax is taxing monies that have already been taxed once before.  As with most anything else in life, there are ways to avoid or reduce the tax.  However, it does take some planning.  That is where a California estate planning attorney can be of assistance.  Depending on your age, size of your estate, your goals and desires, we can show you a variety of ways in which your estate can be “reduced” so that ultimately more is distributed to those whom who you wish to have it and less to Uncle Sam.

If you think you may benefit from estate planning, and you are in Southern California, please contact our office.

Recently a lot was made of the fact that Barron Hilton of Hilton Hotels announced that he was donating 97 percent of his estimated $2.3 billion fortune to charity.  The Conrad N. Hilton Foundation made the announcement indicating that it was to be the recipient of the monies.

Many articles took the position that Paris was losing out.  Some articles indicated that Barron Hilton is not all that happy with his granddaughter.  The implication being that she lost out on an inheritance due to her behavior.

It is likely that Mr. Hilton’s estate planning had nothing to do with his granddaughter and more than a fair amount to do with estate taxes.  By giving his money to a Foundation that his son Steve is president and chief executive of, he allows the family to control the money for a long time, avoids estate taxes and in the case of his grandchildren, avoids the generation skipping tax in addition to the estate tax.