Episode 189 - How Flexible Estate Planning Can Help Insure Your Money is in the Best Hands After Your Death

In this episode of The Lange Money Hour: Where Smart Money Talks, CPA/Attorney and retirement and estate planning expert Jim Lange will discuss his flexible estate planning techniques – focusing in particular on Lange’s Cascading Beneficiary Plan. We all face uncertainty when it comes to predicting who the ideal beneficiary for any given asset will be at the time of our death. We don’t know how much money there will be because we can’t know how the market will perform. There is uncertainty about which family members will have the greatest financial need at the time of our death. Will there be an expensive illness that will mean our surviving spouse needs all of the money? Or perhaps our spouse will have plenty of money, and our children or grandchildren could use the money more. If you draft estate planning documents that don’t account for changing circumstances, your heirs likely won’t get the full benefits of your assets. This strategy, which has been featured in The Wall Street Journal, Newsweek, and Kiplingers involves naming primary and contingent beneficiaries to your IRA or estate plan. What makes it so effective is the concept of “disclaiming” – the idea that each beneficiary can disclaim – or “pass” – on accepting an IRA or other assets. This allows the primary beneficiary to take the assets for themselves, or to say “I don’t need it,” and pass it to the next beneficiary in line. This episode will lay out how flexible estate planning cannot only help get your money into the right hands after your death, but can actually save your heirs thousands – or even hundreds of thousands – of dollars. And Jim will discuss how these techniques are likely to be affected by the looming “Death of the Stretch IRA.”