Dear Clients, Colleagues, and Friends, Harold spent the better part of his life building a profitable business, but one bad day led to a lawsuit that wouldn’t quit, and suddenly his years of hard work evaporated with the loss of his business…and his retirement. To Harold, it’s no surprise that the National Federation of Independent Businesses (NFIB) declared California the #1 judicial hellhole in the United States for the 3rd […]
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Dear Clients, Colleagues, and Friends, In 2011, in response to the new $5M gift tax exemption, we introduced The HYCET Trust®. This trust allows you to reclaim the gift if you later need or want it back. The popularity of this trust has been nothing short of remarkable because of its multipurposes — flexibility, asset protection, and estate tax savings. We have just released our new video on The HYCET […]
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Dear Clients, Colleagues, and Friends, The doorbell rings around midnight. Heading to bed, James and Victoria worriedly check the peephole. Their grown son Brian and his much disliked girlfriend-of-the-month Elle wait outside. James opens the door asking, “Aren’t you supposed to be in Vegas for the weekend?” Elle thrusts her hand in their faces. “We were!” she screams, showing off a huge diamond ring. “You’re engaged?” asks Victoria, crestfallen. “No, […]
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Dear Clients, Colleagues, and Friends, Silicon Valley has been such a leader in technology for over two decades that it has sported a dizzying number of IPOs and huge stock option payoffs creating enormously wealthy entrepreneurs and its own class of marital problems when their marriages breakup. As a community property state, California divorce law generally holds that property obtained during a marriage is fair game, while separate property brought into marriage belongs to that […]
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Dear Clients, Colleagues, and Friends, The weather was gorgeous, the food was delicious, and the conversation had been informative. While the topic was not anyone’s favorite to engage in, Rich and Alice had just updated their two children, ages 23 and 27, on recent changes they had made to their estate planning documents. While the four were waiting for dessert, Rich asked his children, Chris and Chelsea, if they had done any planning for themselves. Chris […]
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Dear Clients, Colleagues, and Friends, In a recent issue of Client Alert, we illustrated just how far the courts are going to hold the “deep pocket” responsible to pay damages even though he or she didn’t cause them. We wrote about John Catsimatidis, a modern business hero and successful immigrant entrepreneur, being found personally liable for millions of dollars in damages because someone in his company was found to violate […]
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The cost of being penny wise and pound foolish… Actor James Gandolfini, who made the mobster Tony Soprano a household name, suddenly died in June of a heart attack at the age of 51. News quickly morphed from sadness over his untimely death to shock over his seemingly ill-conceived estate plan, namely, his will, which was so poorly drafted that up to 80% of his assets are rumored to be […]
Continue readingEver since the 1930s, large companies in the United States have been forming their own property and casualty insurance companies in order to reduce the premium costs charged by commercial companies and insure risks otherwise not covered by commercial companies. During the past 20 years, the costs of establishing one’s own small captive business liability insurance company have come down so that middle market companies have been able to afford […]
Continue readingJohn Catsimatidis is a self-made success. Starting with one supermarket in upper Manhattan in the early ’70s, he grew the Red Apple chain to ten stores by the time he was 24. In 1986, The Red Apple Group acquired the renowned Gristedes chain, and now they were the largest supermarket group in Manhattan. A tough area to grow a retail chain. The group also began to acquire and develop real […]
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