All About Estates

Month: July 2011

Total 19 Posts

Consider a voluntary disclosure where tax filings are either missing or incomplete

Your responsibilities as a trustee or executor of an estate may include completing the tax filings of the deceased and requesting tax clearance prior to the distribution of the estate in accordance with the will terms. Let’s say you find out that the deceased’s tax filings were not all up to date or incomplete and you have read about the possibility of tax penalties.

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Making sure you play with your best hand

In the years that I have been practicing I’ve come to realize the importance of having a team approach to addressing a client’s estate plan. Whether the team includes the accountant, who suggests an ‘estate freeze’, the insurance advisor who considers the extent and type of insurance needed to best fulfill the client’s goals, the investment advisor who works to achieve both the client’s retirement and legacy goals or other lawyers who are involved in the client’s legal affairs, all the advisors have a role to play in ensuring the client’s estate play is properly implemented. No where is the team approach perhaps more paramount than when the areas of family and estate law intersect.

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When It Rains, Use An Umbrella

Seniors have saved for the rainy day, but often they don’t recognize that it is pouring outside.

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Court of Appeal Affirms “Good Sense” of Excluding Evidence of Testator’s Intentions

Yesterday, the Ontario Court of Appeal released its decision in Robinson Estate. The decision acknowledged the trend in Canadian jurisprudence towards admitting extrinsic evidence of the testator’s circumstances and those surrounding the making of the will. However, the Court found that it was not open to the application judge to determine Blanca’s intention based on evidence from third parties about her testamentary intentions.

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TIME FOR A REFREEZE – PART 2

In my last blog, I wrote about how you might consider refreezing your existing freeze shares if the enterprise has recently declined in value, so that your chosen successors can participate sooner in the future growth of your enterprise and in the meantime your tax liability can be reduced on the disposition of those shares by you or your estate. Today I would like to write about how you might accomplish a refreeze and provide you with a few words of caution.

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Saying goodbye.

Do you know where your grandchildren are? When families don’t talk- what happens to the grandchildren?

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