If you have a child who is away at college, you should be aware that the federal medical privacy rules apply to him or her. Once your child turns 18, the federal HIPAA law says that you can no longer have access your child’s medical information without his or her consent. That’s a problem, because if there’s an emergency and your child isn’t able to provide consent, you might not be able to access the information

Executors have a tough and often thankless job. They have to marshal all the estate’s assets, file tax returns, and distribute property according to the will. Sometimes, they make mistakes. Here’s a look at the most common ones: Paying bills too soon. Executors often see bills arrive in the mail and decide to pay them right away to avoid any problems. But this can actually create problems. There’s an order in which bills must be paid:

You might think that estate planning would be easy when couples don’t have children. In fact, it can sometimes be more difficult – and also more important. Couples with children generally agree about passing on their assets to their kids, and can rely on their offspring to serve as caregivers and executors. It might not be so easy for other couples. For instance, suppose Mike and Helen write a will leaving their assets to each other.

It’s a common scenario: An elderly relative is no longer able to live alone, so family members sell the relative’s house and have the relative start living with them or in a nursing home or assisted living facility that’s closer to the family. One thing you might not consider during this stressful process is that if the relative moves to a different state, you might have just changed the person’s official state of residence for tax

Leaving someone an IRA as an inheritance can have a lot of tax advantages, and it’s often a very good estate planning strategy. However, the rules for inherited IRAs are complicated, and it’s easy to make mistakes. If you have recently inherited an IRA, or if you expect to inherit an IRA, it’s important to speak to an estate planner or other advisor right away before you make any decisions about the account. And if you’re

Have you ever considered writing down a list of all your assets (with account numbers, passwords, and so on), as well as debts and recurring payments? Making such a list and putting it in a secure place can be a godsend if something ever happens to you and you become incapacitated, because your family will have a much easier time looking after your affairs. In a recent article in the Wall Street Journal, a middle-class couple

Congress has revived a law that lets you make charitable donations directly from your IRA, which might provide you with some significant tax advantages. The “IRA charitable rollover” was discontinued at the end of 2014. But Congress has now resurrected it, made it permanent, and also made it retroactive to the beginning of 2015. If you’re over the age of 70½, you’re required to take minimum distributions each year from your IRA, and you have to

Even though a wealthy family put assets in a trust for their children in order to protect them from creditors, a child’s interest in the trust could be divided in a divorce, says the Massachusetts Appeals Court. While this result is unusual, it goes to show that even a solid spendthrift trust might not be perfect if a creditor – in this case, a spouse – is sympathetic enough. Curt Pfannenstiehl was a beneficiary of a

Stockbrokers, financial planners and insurance agents who provide advice regarding IRAs and other retirement accounts will have new responsibilities toward clients, and the way they bill their clients may change, under new rules announced by the U.S. Labor Department. Under the rules, advisors must now act in their clients’ best interests when they make recommendations. In the past, many advisors merely had to make recommendations that were “suitable” for a client, even if what they recommended

Executors who have to file a federal estate tax return, and some heirs who receive assets from an estate that is subject to the federal estate tax, may be facing a significant new problem as a result of rules just issued by the IRS. The problem only affects larger estates – generally those where the deceased person’s assets, large lifetime gifts, and life insurance proceeds total more than $5.45 million. But for those estates, it’s a