Recent Articles from Mira Finé
Taxes today: Higher, lower or just different?
I remember the tax-cutting years in previous political eras. Those were the good old days. Now it’s easy to get the impression we have higher income taxes and an extra tax on investment earnings. But analyzing taxes and the reasons behind them are not that simple. Some brackets are actually lower...
Which way the taxation winds are blowing: Part 2
(Editor’s note: This is the second of two parts. Read Part 1.) Steve Wyett, senior vice president of portfolio management at BOK Financial, said recently that the Congressional Budget Office is predicting the budget deficit in 2013 to go to $642 billion, a $200 billion improvement. He called the deficit “unsustainably large. We’ve got to […]
The hot new thing in wealth planning isn’t new
The recent IPO by Facebook founders led to their creation of grantor trusts to avoid paying taxes of at least $200 million. It underlined new uses of a technique that has been around for a long time. Grantor trusts, including defective trusts, are still the hot new thing. The idea of trust law originated in […]
Protecting the assets you have
The recession wiped out nearly 40 percent, or two decades’ worth of Americans’ wealth, the Federal Reserve said earlier this year. This shift in wealth will have a major impact across all aspects of family and wealth, not only for the middle class, but also for wealthier people and business owners. The brunt of the […]
The hot new thing in wealth planning
The recent IPO by Facebook founders led to their creation of grantor trusts to avoid paying taxes of at least $200 million. It underlined new uses of a technique that has been around for a long time. Grantor trusts, including defective trusts, are still the hot new thing. The idea of trust law originated in […]