Paying for an aging loved one’s care sometimes results in a medical expense deduction. Paying for a deceased loved one’s funeral, on the other hand,...
Martin Shenkman, CPA, JD
Articles by this author
Common Estate-Planning Mistakes and How to Avoid Them
Having your will done doesn’t mean you’re done with estate planning. While the last will and testament is easily the best-known estate-planning document, it’s not...
Gift Tax Rules: How to Gift Money to Family
A married couple helps their adult child make a downpayment on his first home. A woman pays her aging mother’s hospital bills. An older couple...
How Long Should You Keep Tax Returns?
How long do you keep tax returns and related paperwork? If you look for guidance about recordkeeping from the IRS website, the answer seems straightforward—retain...
Don’t Overlook This Important Estate-Planning Document
Even people who pay attorneys to draft their estate-plan documents often forget to include letters of instruction. These informal documents provide guidance to the executor...
New Reporting Requirement for Small Businesses
Effective this year, the Corporate Transparency Act (CTA) requires small businesses and entities to file ownership information with the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN), a...
SLATs: Not Just for the Wealthy
People often assume that Spousal Lifetime Access Trusts (SLATs) aren’t for them. After all, with the federal estate-tax exemption at nearly $13 million in 2023,...
Time to Revise Your Will?
Will your will actually do what you want it to do? You might never know—but your heirs could pay the price if it doesn’t. Working...
Is a Family Limited Partnership Right for You?
Do you think a Family Limited Partnership (FLP) is something that you don’t need to consider? Maybe…maybe not. FLPs—a type of business entity owned by...
Giving a Gift? Avoid These Tax Reporting Mistakes
If you give someone a big gift, the IRS will have a gift for you, too—a tax form that’s a lot trickier than it appears....
When a Loved One Doesn’t Have a Will
A man walked into tax attorney Martin Shenkman’s office some years ago with a problem—he had inherited a large sum of money. Nice problem to...
Time to Review Your Estate-Planning Tools
Have your estate-planning tools turned against you? Can you trust your trusts to work as intended? Estate-planning decisions that made perfect sense when you put...