Amy's Angle

  Managing Your Digital Afterlife: A Guide To Facebook’s Legacy Contact by Amy Clemmons Brown, Esq. If you use Facebook to share, track, and report on important life events, it can provide an intimate snapshot of your life, and it can also serve as a key part of your legacy—and one you’ll likely want to protect following your death. With this in mind, as with any other digital asset you own, you should include your Facebook profile as part of your estate plan. While you’ll want to include your Facebook profile in your plan’s inventory of digital assets, Facebook also offers a special function, known as a “legacy contact,” for managing your profile after death. Using a legacy contact, you can choose someone to look after your account and control the activities of your account once you’ve passed away. If you are interested in preserving your digital legacy using Facebook’s legacy contact, here I’ll break down the basics of how this function works.  Managing Your Digital Aft...

  New Developments Transform the Role Life Insurance Plays in Your Estate and Financial Planning by Amy Clemmons Brown, Esq. Within the past year, a combination of new legislation and the recent change of leadership in the White House and Congress stands to dramatically increase the income taxes your loved ones will have to pay on inherited retirement accounts as well as increasing the income taxes you owe on your taxable investments. However, purchasing life insurance may offer you the opportunity to minimize the effect of these developments. To this end, if you hold assets in a retirement account, you need to review your financial plan and estate plan as soon as possible to determine if investing in life insurance or some other strategy may offer tax-saving benefits for you and your family. To help you with this process, here we’ll discuss how these new developments might affect the taxes owed by you and your heirs, and how investing in life insurance may help offset the tax im...

  Does Your Estate Plan Protect Your Intellectual Property? by Amy Clemmons Brown, Esq. If you own a business, you almost certainly have intellectual property. However, because your intellectual property is intangible, it can be invisible to you and those who aren’t familiar with the nature of intellectual property and its value, so it often gets overlooked, especially when it comes to estate planning. Yet, if you fail to properly document your intellectual property, your estate plan will likely not protect it—and this could cause your loved ones to miss out on what can be among your most valuable assets. When we talk about intellectual property, we’re referring to creations of the mind, including inventions, literary and artistic works, designs, logos, brand names, and images, all of which are used in the course of a business. Even if you’ve worked with a lawyer to set up your business entity or a CPA to file your taxes, those advisors may not be thinking about or helping yo...