Wednesday, February 29, 2012

California Trust & Estate Lawyer has moved!

Gentle Readers, in order to bring a better blog experience to you, I have moved California Trust and Estate Lawyer to Wordpress. The new address is:

http://caltrustlawyer.wordpress.com/

Please come by and check it out.  I've migrated all the posts from this site, so it is good to go!

See you there.

Monday, January 9, 2012

Estate Tax Exemption Increase for 2012

As part of the tax law changes passed in December 2010, Congress set the amount of an estate's assets that can pass free of estate tax at $5 million for 2011, indexed for inflation.  So, in 2012, the amount increases to $5.12 million.

Don't get too comfortable with this bounty, though.  The current law is set to expire at the end of this year, with the applicable exclusion amount, as it's known, decreasing to $1 million.  Congress will likely do something, at the last minute, again, to keep that from happening, but it is anyone's guess that that might be (perhaps an extension for another two years?).

I suppose that this is really only an issue for a fortunate, prosperous few.