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The Power of Coordination

Posted By Lineweaver Financial Group
April 18, 2019 Category: Coordination, Tax, Legal, Insurance, Financial, Wills, Estate Planning, Taxes, Retirement

  At the Lineweaver Companies, we believe a team approach to coordinating all your financial, legal, tax, and insurance needs helps save you time, money and worry.   For example, we had clients who were both close to retirement, and unfortunately the husband had been diagnosed with terminal cancer. The first thing we did was to work with them to make sure his pension was triggered in such a way that the wife could receive a greater lifetime benefit - almost a million more dollars than she would have otherwise received.   At the same time, in this sort of situation, you have to consider powers of attorney – and other basic estate planning documents that everyone should have, like wills, and even if trusts make sense for your particular situation.   There were also huge student loan balances of more than $120,000. But, because they kept the loans entirely in the father’s name, when he passed, the debt was forgiven. But what many people don’t know is that the forgiveness of debt – in this case student loan debt - is considered income by the IRS – and therefore taxable. As you can imagine, in this case it was significant: an additional $40,000. However, we were able to work with the family and the IRS to get the entire amount forgiven as well – so they ended up having the debt and the tax bill forgiven.   Given the pension payouts and their savings, they had significant assets that needed to be managed eff