Attorney Suzanne Sayward

Five Estate Planning Resolutions for the New Year

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It’s that time of year again when we resolve to do better in the coming year than we did in the past year.  Exercise regularly, eat healthy, and get better sleep are common January pledges.  The new year is also a good time to resolve to take action on your estate plan.  Read on for five estate planning resolutions for 2023.  

1. Create or Update your Estate Plan

If you don’t currently have an estate plan (Will, Power of Attorney, health care documents and maybe a Trust), resolve to remedy that situation in 2023.  Creating an estate plan is important for everyone age 18 and older.  Even if your assets are modest, it is vital to appoint people who are legally authorized to make decisions for and about you if you experience a period of incapacity. If you have young children, a large estate, a beneficiary with disabilities, a second marriage, multiple properties, or other more complex situations, a Trust may be advisable to meet your planning goals.  If you have an estate plan but it has been more than five years since you reviewed your plan, resolve to meet with your estate planning attorney to review and update your plan as needed. 

2. Check your Beneficiary Designations

Many of your most significant assets – life insurance, retirement accounts, annuities – will be paid to a designated beneficiary at your death.  Properly designating those beneficiaries is more complicated than it may appear.   If you have minor children to provide for, or if you want to benefit a person with disabilities who receives, or may receive, needs-based governmental benefits, it is best that assets pay to a Trust for those beneficiaries. Understanding how distributions from retirement accounts work after the death of the account owner, and how different beneficiary designations will impact the size, frequency and income tax payable on those distributions is crucial to making appropriate designations. Ensuring your beneficiary designations are consistent with your overall estate plan is critical to accomplishing your estate planning goals.

3. Resolve to Fund your Trust 

If you have created a Living Trust as part of your estate plan, follow through and retitle your assets as directed by your estate planning attorney.  Two of the main reasons for creating Trusts include probate avoidance and estate tax savings.  However, your Trust will not achieve these goals if you do not change the ownership of your assets during your lifetime from your individual (or joint) names to the name of your Trust.  There is no question that this can be a time-consuming task since it may involve meeting with a customer service representative at the bank, calling financial institutions to determine the process for making the change, completing the paperwork, and then following up with the companies to confirm that the changes have been properly instituted.  However, these steps are essential to the success of your plan.  If you are not able to accomplish the trust funding tasks, contact your estate planning attorney to obtain assistance.  Many estate planning law firms offer trust funding services.  

4. Provide copies of your Health Care Documents to your Health Care Agent 

Documents expressing wishes regarding end-of-life-care and instructions regarding medical treatment are a vital part of every estate plan.  In Massachusetts, these often include a Health Care Proxy and a Living Will.  A Health Care Proxy is the legal document used to appoint the person who will make health care decisions for you if you are not able to do so.  The appointed individual is called your Health Care Agent.  A Living Will is not a binding legal document in Massachusetts but is used as a way to express a person’s wish that extraordinary medical measures not be used to prolong life in circumstances where death is imminent. Once signed, copies of these documents should be provided to your Health Care Agent and a copy of your Health Care Proxy should be given to your primary care physician’s office as well as to any other doctors who regularly treat you. We recommend that you provide these documents to your Health Care Agent electronically.  That way your Health Care Agent can save those electronic copies on their phone or in their cloud-storage service (Dropbox, Google drive, etc.) so that they are immediately accessible.  You should save your own Health Care Proxy, as well as the Proxies of anyone for whom you may be named as Health Care Agent, on your phone or in the cloud as well. 

5. Organize your Financial Records 

A primary purpose of estate planning is to make it easier for people to help you if you become incapacitated and to ease the burden on the people who will be dealing with your estate when you pass away.  One of the greatest gifts you can give the people you have named to these positions, is the gift of well-organized records.  We handle a lot of estate and trust settlement matters in my office and one of the hardest parts for family members or others named as fiduciaries is finding information about assets: bank accounts, investment accounts, retirement accounts, pensions, life insurance, etc.  The same is true for debts and monthly bills.  This problem has become worse as more and more people move to paperless status for their accounts and bill pay.  Keeping an up-to-date list of all of your accounts and a file folder with a paper copy of a recent statement will be incredibly helpful to the person who is trying to manage these for you.  Set up a file with folders for your life insurance, long-term care insurance, each retirement account, your pension, each bank account, etc.  Do the same for your bills and don’t forget bills that are paid less frequently than monthly such as annual life insurance, homeowner’s insurance, etc.  Create a folder for your car with a copy of the registration, the title or lease agreement, auto insurance, car loan, etc.  If you have records that are only stored electronically such as income tax returns, create a folder and include information about how to access those electronic records.  Start in January and add to it each month and by next December you will have compiled a complete set of your records.

Good luck with the dieting, exercising and sleeping better in 2023.  If we can help with your estate planning, please contact our office to schedule a time to speak with one of our attorneys.  Happy New Year and best wishes for a happy and healthy 2023!  

Attorney Suzanne R. Sayward is a partner with the Dedham law firm of Samuel, Sayward & Baler LLC which focuses on advising its clients in the areas of estate planning, estate settlement and elder law matters. She is certified as an Elder Law Attorney by the National Elder Law Foundation, a private organization whose standards for certification are not regulated by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.  This article is not intended to provide legal advice or create or imply an attorney-client relationship. No information contained herein is a substitute for a personal consultation with an attorney. For more information visit our website at www.ssbllc.com or call 781/461-1020.

January, 2023

© 2023 Samuel, Sayward & Baler LLC

‘Tis the Season for Gifting

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The end of the year is often a time when people think about making gifts to loved ones for the holidays or for year-end tax planning.  Since we are in December, what better time to talk about the Gift Tax?  

Here are a few things to know about the gift tax.

  • Since there is no gift tax in Massachusetts, residents of the commonwealth need only be concerned about the federal gift tax.
  • There are two ‘exemptions’ or ‘freebies’ under the federal gift tax law:
    • The Annual Gift Tax Exclusion is the amount that each person may gift to any number of other individuals without any impact on the giver’s Lifetime Gift Tax Exemption.  In 2022, the Annual Gift Tax Exclusion amount is $16,000.  As of January 1, 2023, the Annual Gift Tax Exclusion amount will be $17,000. Gifts to any one person in a calendar year in excess of the Annual Gift Tax Exclusion amount will reduce the giver’s Lifetime Gift Tax Exemption by the amount in excess of the Annual Exclusion. 
    • In addition to the Annual Gift Tax Exclusion, each person has a Lifetime Gift Tax Exemption.  This Lifetime Exemption is the amount that each person may gift over and above the annual exclusion gifts.  In 2022, the Lifetime Exemption is $12,060,000.  As of January 1, 2023, the Lifetime Gift Tax Exemption will be $12.9 million. 
  • There is no limit on the amount you may give to your U.S. citizen spouse free of any federal gift tax.  There is an annual exclusion limitation for gifts to non-U.S. citizen spouses.  This amount is $164,000 in 2022 and $175,000 in 2023.  
  • There is no limit on the amount you may pay on behalf of any individual for tuition or medical expenses, provided these payments are made directly to the educational or medical institution.
  • There is no gift tax payable on gifts to qualified charities. 

The gift tax is not the only tax to take into consideration when thinking about making large gifts; there may be income tax, estate tax, and capital gain tax consequences.  And of course, taxes are not the only concern when making large gifts – there may be long-term care ramifications, concerns about a recipient’s ability to handle a large sum, and worries about potential threats to the gift by the recipient’s creditors (divorcing spouse, failed business, lawsuit, etc.).   If you are considering making large gifts to family members, talk with your estate plan attorney to make sure you have a good understanding of all of the consequences.  

 Attorney Suzanne R. Sayward is a partner with the Dedham firm of Samuel, Sayward & Baler LLC which focuses on advising its clients in the areas of estate planning, estate settlement and elder law matters. She is certified as an Elder Law Attorney by the National Elder Law Foundation, a private organization whose standards for certification are not regulated by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.  This article is not intended to provide legal advice or create or imply an attorney-client relationship. No information contained herein is a substitute for a personal consultation with an attorney. For more information visit www.ssbllc.com or call 781/461-1020.

December, 2022

© 2022 Samuel, Sayward & Baler LLC

Happy Holidays from Samuel, Sayward & Baler LLC (Including Our Version of The Twelve Days of Holiday Estate Planning)

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Hello and Welcome to this week’s Holiday Edition of Smart Counsel for Lunch. We want to wish you all a happy holiday and healthy new year! Please enjoy our holiday message along with an additional video below on the Twelve Days of Holiday Estate Planning.

Please enjoy our video on The Twelve Days of Holiday Estate Planning.

What’s New at Samuel, Sayward & Baler LLC – Don’t Miss Our October 2022 Newsletter

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Don’t Miss Our October 2022 Newsletter

Attorney Suzanne Sayward discusses our most recent newsletter, for our Smart Counsel for Lunch Series. Please watch and if you have any questions or want to learn more then call us at 781 461-1020. Please find our newsletter below.

Five Life Events That Merit a Review and Update of your Estate Plan

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Creating an estate plan (Will, Trust, Power of Attorney, etc.) is a key step in making sure that your wishes are carried out and that your family is taken care of in the way you wish when you pass away.  But an estate plan is not a ‘one-and-done’ proposition.  Life happens and when it does…well, it may be time to adjust your plan.  

Read on for five situations that call for a review and update of your estate plan. 

  1. Your marital status changes.  In Massachusetts, a change in your marital status impacts your current estate plan (even if you haven’t created an estate plan!).  Marriage confers certain rights, including the right of spouses to inherit from each other. How much of your estate your spouse is entitled to inherit depends on whether you have children together, whether either of you has children from a prior relationship, or whether neither of you has any children.  Regardless of your situation, most people prefer to decide for themselves what their new spouse will inherit rather than have the government make that decision.  Similarly, divorce impacts your estate plan in that your former spouse is effectively ‘deleted’ as a beneficiary under your Will and removed from fiduciary positions.  While this is usually the desired outcome as to a former spouse, the law also removes any of your former spouse’s relatives as beneficiaries and from fiduciary positions which may not necessarily be the intention.  For example, a former spouse’s sibling may still be the person you would name as the guardian for your minor children.  Further, although the law may “remove” these individuals from your plan, you should update your plan to include appropriate people in their place as beneficiaries and fiduciaries.
  2. You have a child.  The law in Massachusetts provides that if a person dies with a child surviving (or more remote descendants in cases where a child has predeceased the parent) the child will inherit from the parent before assets would pass to anyone else (other than a surviving spouse who is first in line to inherit).  However, the law also deems that adult-hood is reached at age 18.  That means children who inherit from parents who have not created an estate plan that provides otherwise, will be entitled to receive the full amount of their inheritance at age 18.  Prior to reaching age 18, a child’s inheritance will be managed for her by a court-appointed conservator if the parents have not created a Trust to manage their estate for their children.  Most parents: 1) would prefer to decide who should be in charge of managing assets for their children rather than have the probate court make that decision; and, 2) do not want their children to have full, unfettered access to the inheritance they leave them at age 18.  Creating a Trust that designates the people who will manage assets for their children at their deaths and specifies the ages, or events, at which a child will be entitled to full access to their inheritance allows the parents make these decisions rather than the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.
  3. You or your spouse are diagnosed with a serious illness.   While having a child and getting married (and for some, getting divorced) are joyous life events that merit a review and update of an estate plan, not all life events are good.  If either you or your spouse is diagnosed with a terminal illness, or with a serious disease or condition such as Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, or dementia, that could result in the need for long-term care, reviewing and updating your estate plan is not just important but often urgent.  There may be actions needed to reduce taxes or to preserve assets from being consumed by expensive long-term care costs that should be implemented right away.  In addition, it is important to make sure there is documentation in place such as a robust durable Power of Attorney and a comprehensive, up-to-date Health Care Proxy so that you are able to make decisions for a spouse who may lose the ability to do so as a result of the illness.  These documents need to be created while the maker still has the capacity to do so.
  4. Your spouse passes away.  Reviewing and updating your estate plan when a spouse passes away is a prudent action to take.
    People usually name their spouse to the primary fiduciary roles of Personal Representative, Attorney-in-fact, Health Care Agent, and Trustee.  While there is often a back-up named to those roles, reviewing your estate plan to re-visit whether that designated alternate is still the right person to serve and updating your plan to designate a successor to your new primary fiduciary is a smart thing to do.
  5. One of your fiduciaries or beneficiaries dies or becomes ill.  When someone you designated as a fiduciary in your estate plan passes away or becomes ill such that they would no longer be able to carry out those duties, it is time to update your estate plan.  Similarly, when a beneficiary dies or becomes ill, a review of the provisions of your estate plan as they relate to that person is sensible.  Your estate plan most likely includes a provision directing what should happen to the share of a beneficiary who predeceases you.  However, it has been my experience that clients’ thinking often changes when one of their beneficiaries predeceases them and they want to update their plan to change their distribution provisions.  Similarly, if a beneficiary of your plan is diagnosed with a disease or condition such as Alzheimer’s or dementia, meet with your estate planning attorney to consider whether leaving money to that person is still a good idea.  Many individuals who need long-term care are eligible for needs-based governmental benefits to pay for that care.  Receiving an inheritance can cause them to lose that eligibility.

Above are just five of the life events that merit a review and update of an estate plan.  Other changes such a significant increase in the value of your estate, relocation to another state, a disability affecting one of your beneficiaries, or even the passage of more than five or six years since your last estate plan review, are additional examples of life events that merit a review of your plan.  If any of the above situations applies to you, don’t wait to contact your estate planning attorney to schedule a time to review and update your plan.  If you have never created an estate plan, now’s a good time to do so.  If we can help you create or update your estate plan, please contact our office to schedule a time to meet with one of our experienced estate planning attorneys. 

Attorney Suzanne R. Sayward is a partner with the Dedham law firm of Samuel, Sayward & Baler LLC which focuses on advising its clients in the areas of estate planning, elder law, estate and trust settlement and probate. She is certified as an Elder Law Attorney by the National Elder Law Foundation, a private organization whose standards for certification are not regulated by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.  This article is not intended to provide legal advice or create or imply an attorney-client relationship. No information contained herein is a substitute for a personal consultation with an attorney. For more information visit our website at www.ssbllc.com or call 781/461-1020.

September, 2022

© 2022 Samuel, Sayward & Baler LLC

Trustee, Beneficiary, Grantor, and more – What do they all mean?

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As in most professions, lawyers speak their own language that is often meaningless to non-lawyers (think, ‘tort’, ‘habeas corpus’ and ‘nunc pro tunc’). Even worse, within the broad category of the law, there are the specialized areas (personal injury, criminal defense, patent law), each of which also has its own lingo. Estate planning attorneys are no different. We use terms such as ‘Personal Representative’, ‘Attorney-in-fact’, and ‘Trustee’ when speaking with our clients without always taking the time to fully explain what those terms mean.

Here’s a primer on some of the more common terms associated with Revocable Living Trusts.

A Trust is an agreement among three parties in which one party entrusts a second party with assets that are to be managed for a third party. A Living Trust is a Trust created by someone during their lifetime and which can be funded with assets during lifetime. The person who creates a Revocable Trust reserves the right to modify the Trust terms at any time and retains access to the Trust assets. While there is such a thing as an oral trust, most Trusts are in writing. A well-written Trust will clearly define the rights and responsibilities of each of the parties to the Trust.

The person who creates a Trust may be called the Grantor, the Donor, the Settlor, the Trustor or even the Trust Maker. This is the person who is entrusting his or her assets to the other party.

The Trustee is the person to whom the assets are entrusted and who accepts the assets and agrees to hold and manage them for the benefit of a third party upon the terms and conditions set out in the Trust. A Trustee is a fiduciary which means that the Trustee owes the highest duty of good faith and fair dealing to the beneficiary.

The Beneficiary is the person for whom the entrusted assets are being held and managed. The benefits which the Beneficiary is entitled to received will be determined by the person who creates the Trust (i.e., the Grantor) and stated in the Trust document. For example, a Grantor may decide that a beneficiary is entitled to receive only the income generated by the assets in the Trust during the beneficiary’s lifetime, and that the Trust assets will be distributed to a different person (the remainder beneficiary) upon the death of the income beneficiary. A Trust may state that a beneficiary is entitled to receive some or all of the principal held by the Trustee at certain times (i.e., when the beneficiary turns 25) or upon the happening of a certain event (i.e., the beneficiary graduates from college). Sometimes a Grantor will grant the Trustee complete discretion to decide if and when and for what reasons distributions may be made to a beneficiary.

Who typically serves in these roles? Well, it is quite common when creating a basic estate planning Trust (a Revocable Living Trust), that the roles of the Grantor, Trustee and Beneficiary are the same person upon the initial creation of the Trust.

Here’s an example of the parties to a typical Revocable Living Trust. Mary Jones creates a Trust she calls the Mary Jones Trust and names herself as the Trustee. During Mary’s lifetime, the Trust assets may be used only for Mary’s benefit. Mary is the Grantor, Trustee and Beneficiary. In her Trust document, Mary names her sister Lily as the successor Trustee.

When Mary become incapacitated, Lily steps into her shoes as Trustee. During Mary’s incapacity, Lily as Trustee, will manage the Trust assets for Mary who is still the beneficiary.

Mary’s Trust states that when she passes away, her children Allison and Barry are the Beneficiaries. Mary is still the grantor of the Trust even when she dies. After Mary’s death, Lily continues to serve as the Trustee for Allison and Barry as Beneficiaries and manages the Trust assets for them in accordance with the instructions in Mary’s Trust.

Don’t let unfamiliar terminology scare you away from creating the plan that is right for you and your family. Consult with an experienced estate planning attorney who will explain complex concepts and specialized terms in an understandable manner, and help you create a plan that reflects your wishes.

If you have questions about creating a Trust or serving as Trustee, please contact us to schedule an appointment with one of our firm’s attorneys.

Attorney Suzanne R. Sayward is a partner with the Dedham firm of Samuel, Sayward & Baler LLC which focuses on advising its clients in the areas of estate planning, estate and trust administration, probate, and elder law matters. She is certified as an Elder Law Attorney by the National Elder Law Foundation, a private organization whose standards for certification are not regulated by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. This article is not intended to provide legal advice or create or imply an attorney-client relationship. No information contained herein is a substitute for a personal consultation with an attorney. For more information visit www.ssbllc.com or call 781/461-1020.
July, 2022
© 2022 Samuel, Sayward & Baler LLC

Estate Planning and Elder Law 101

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Estate Planning Lawyer - Weston Ma presenation

Attorney Suzanne Sayward spoke on June 17th 2022 at the Westin Council of Aging on Estate Planning 101. She began the presentation with common estate planning documents that are important for people to know about which included: Wills, Powers of Attorney, Health Care proxies, Living Wills, HIPAA Authorizations, Trusts, Deeds with Life Estates and Declaration of Homestead.

She continued on with pertinent issues for those who already have an estate. Those included Avoiding Probate, Why not Joint ownership?, How to pay for long-term care, Eligibility for long-term Medicaid, What if no pre-planning has been done and long-term care is needed?, Life Estate Deeds, Avoiding Probate, Revocable Living Trusts, Estate Taxes and how to reduce them, What’s in a Taxable Estate, and Gift Taxes.

Click here to watch the video

Suzanne Sayward is a partner with the Dedham Massachusetts law firm of Samuel, Sayward and Baler LLC where she concentrates her practice in the areas of estate planning, estate and trust administration, elder law, and probate. She is a certified as a Elder Law Attorney (CELA) by the National Elder Law Foundation.* Attorney Sayward is a member of the Massachusetts Chapter of the National Academy of Elder Law Attorneys where she served on the Board of Directors for many years and as the Chapter’s President in 2009. 

Attorney Sayward was named to Boston Magazine’s annual list of “Massachusetts Super Lawyers” for the years 2010 through 2022.

 

Wills • Trusts • Elder Law • Long-Term Care Planning • Estates

©2023 Samuel, Sayward & Baler LLP. All Rights Reserved. The information presented on this website should not be construed to provide legal advice, nor does it constitute the formation of an attorney/client relationship. Read the disclaimer.