Amy's Angle

  Larry King’s Death Highlights the Importance of Updating Your Estate Plan for Divorce and Death—Part One by Amy Clemmons Brown, Esq. Legendary TV and radio host, Larry King, died at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles on January 23rd, 2021 at age 87. Larry was hospitalized in December due to COVID-19, but he’d recently been moved from the ICU to a regular hospital room after recovering from the virus. However, the famed broadcaster suffered from a number of other health conditions over the years, including multiple heart attacks, kidney failure, and diabetes, and he passed away from sepsis that was the result of an unrelated infection. With a career spanning more than half a century, Larry became the most famous interviewer of his generation as the host of CNN’s Larry King Live , a follow-up to his nationwide call-in radio show, The Larry King Show, which started in 1978. Larry retired from CNN in 2010, but up until the very end, he still hosted the streaming video ca...

  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...

What You Should Know Before Agreeing to Serve as Trustee by Amy Clemmons Brown, Esq. Being asked by a loved one to serve as trustee for their trust upon their death can be quite an honor, but it’s also a major responsibility—and the role is definitely not for everyone. Indeed, serving as a trustee entails a broad array of duties, and you are both ethically and legally required to properly execute those duties or face potential liability. In the end, your responsibility as a trustee will vary greatly depending on the size of the estate, the type of assets covered by the trust, the type of trust, how many beneficiaries there are, and the document’s terms. In light of this, you should carefully review the specifics of the trust you would be managing before making your decision to serve. And remember, you don’t have to take the job.   Yet, depending on who nominated you, declining to serve may not be an easy or practical option. On the other hand, you might actually enjoy the op...

  Remarrying In Midlife? Avoid Accidently Disinheriting Your Loved Ones by Amy Clemmons Brown, Esq. Today, we’re seeing more and more people getting divorced in middle age and beyond. Indeed, the trend of couples getting divorced after age 50 has grown so common, it’s even garnered its own nickname: “gray divorce.”  Today, roughly one in four divorces involve those over 50, and divorce rates for this demographic have doubled in the past 30 years, according to the study Gray Divorce Revolution . For those over age 65, divorce rates have tripled. With divorce coming so late in life, the financial fallout can be quite devastating. Indeed, Bloomberg.com found that the standard of living for women who divorce after age 50 drops by some 45%, while it falls roughly 21% for men. Given the significant decrease in income and the fact people are living longer than ever, it’s no surprise that many of these folks also choose to get remarried. And those who do get remarried frequently...

Former Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh Dies Without A Will by Amy Clemmons Brown, Esq. Tony Hsieh became an Internet pioneer, starting two wildly successful companies, LinkExchange and Zappos, the latter of which he sold to Amazon for $1.2 billion. It was as CEO of the online shoe brand Zappos where Hsieh developed his vision for life and business: delivering happiness. A Double Life Hsieh outlined this mission in the 2010 book, Delivering Happiness: A Path To Profits, Passion and Purpose , which became a New York Times number-one bestseller. Yet while the young entrepreneur was busy bringing joy to his customers, employees, and friends, Hsieh was privately coping with mental health issues and substance abuse. These struggles reportedly intensified in 2020, as the pandemic-related quarantines put an end to the non-stop parties and socializing Hsieh came to crave. Hsieh’s downward spiral also coincided with his relocation from Las Vegas to Park City, Utah. In Park City, Hsieh became further iso...