Planning Potpourri

Protect Your Domain:

A man’s home use to be his castle. A man’s home might
now be his domain. Like many entrepreneurs, you may have accumulated nearly a
score of domain names. Your key businesses have domain names. The ideas you
were batting around with Joe at the corner bar led you to reserve a couple of
domain names, and so on. In many cases these domain names are scattered among a
number of different providers with random renewal dates. There’s danger in this
disarray. The media recently reported how a company lost its domain name since
it did not renew it. The provider could not reach the owner because its contact
information wasn’t current. KISS solution: consolidate all your domain names to
one provider. We like www.godaddy.com,
and not only for their Dobbi Gillis sounding name. For a modest fee you can
have all your domain names expire on the same date. You can pay for those names
for 10 years, so the renewal problem won’t arise for that long. Calendar that
renewal date. If your email or other contact information change, you only have
one provider to notify.

Is your Broker Your
Friend:

Many wealth
managers, brokers and other financial providers encourage customers meet with
their estate planning team (or to sign beneficiary designations for
non-retirement accounts). Are they motivated by helping you or something else?
The average brokerage account stays in place for 4 years. The average trust
account stays with the same firm for 14 years. Might this have something to do
with the bull market in financial firms hiring estate planners? Could you be
getting more independent advice from your own estate planner? When your wealth
manager and financial planner want to coordinate and meet with your independent
advisers, rather than replacing them with their own, that might be a good sign
that they’re actually interested in service and performance, not just account
retention.

Rolling GRATs:
Short term grantor retained annuity trusts are
a popular estate tax minimization tool that seeks to remove upside equity
market volatility from your estate. Some wealth managers goose up this benefit
by segregating different equity classes in different GRATs. However, if you’re
worried about malpractice, this technique will shift significant unprotected
securities back to your estate each year. Possible solution: establish separate
LLCs for different equity classes and fund partial interests in each to
separate rolling GRATs so the leakage retains some measure of protection.