New year, new asset plan: Re-evaluating your financial future

The Palm Beach Daily News recently published Estate Planning: Are you on the right path? with content provided by members of the Palm Beach County Estate Planning Council. The January 10 advertising supplement offers insightful information from attorneys, wealth advisers, accounts, trust officers, care providers and more, according to council president Michael Becker in the supplement's introduction.

This 17th edition of the annual publication covers a wide range of estate planning topics, including medical preparedness, protecting your digital footprint, the future of bitcoin, and jewelry: asset or accessory?

Three articles written by Gunster estate planning attorneys were included in the supplement:

• You can have your cake and eat it, too / Using Section 2519 to make gifts from marital trusts (page 9) - by Lisa Schneider and Alyse Reiser Comiter

In this article, Schneider and Comiter discuss how a marital (QTIP) trust may be severed in order to transfer an appreciating asset in the trust using current gift tax exemptions, rather than passing along a higher tax to beneficiaries later.

• Recent developments for Florida Family Trust Companies (page 10) - by Steve Vogelsang

A "glitch bill" has been reintroduced as HB 17 and SB 80 for consideration in the 2016 legislative session. In this article Vogelsang discusses the ways in which the bill will improve the Florida Family Trust Company Act, which regulates FTCs. The glitch bill aims, he explains, to make Florida a preferred destination for FTC business for its favorable tax and trust laws, and straightforward compliance requirements for forming a new FTC.

• Simplified and flexible planning for couples with the single QTIP trust (page 11) - by Jane Brown

Brown lays out five advantages of a couple's use of the single QTIP trust. These include reducing capital gains tax, planning flexibility and minimizing nonresident estate tax.

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The Palm Beach County Estate Planning Council is a nonprofit organization that acts as a resource for estate planning professionals in Palm Beach County. The two key purposes of the council are to increase the overall knowledge of its membership and to enhance the professionalism and interaction of its members for the benefit of their clients and the public via academic exploration of specific topics of common interest.

Read the entire digital edition of the Palm Beach Daily News' Estate Planning advertising supplement published on Jan. 10, 2016.