When choosing among cash flow opportunities, from the prepayment of loan principal to various investments, investors may be best served by following a quantitative framework to maximize future returns while considering the funding and timing needs of their goals. Any strategy must balance generating greater potential returns with an investor’s behavior, risk tolerance, and liquidity needs over time.
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Ransomware is a dynamically evolving risk, impacting organizations around the world with rapidly increasing loss frequency and severity. The insights on this risk are intended to focus conversations around loss preparation and risk management, and help guide well-informed cybersecurity investments.
Amid low interest rates and volatile asset values, high-net-worth individuals are taking a fresh look at a powerful wealth transfer tool—grantor-retained annuity trusts, or GRATs. When GRATs are used correctly, they can reduce estate taxes and allow grantors to gift assets free of tax.
In a rapidly evolving virtual world, many family offices are revising or creating document retention practices to make sure they have secure access to critical personnel and family financial records. Through a series of FAQs and a checklist of what documents to retain, you can ensure that you have an up-to-date document retention policy as part of your document management process that will help mitigate concerns over data security and loss of key information.
Some families start a private foundation because they want to give back while others are seeking tax savings. Whatever the impetus, private foundations serve as a powerful and flexible philanthropic vehicle and offer tremendous advantages over giving as an individual donor.
At the most basic level, the difference between a donor-advised fund (DAF) and a private foundation is the construct, or form, in which each entity is created and operated. Because a private foundation is a freestanding legal entity, and a DAF is an account, the two charitable vehicles offer very different levels of control, authority, and philanthropic versatility. For families considering which charitable structure to form, this side-by-side comparison is a helpful guide. And it turns out that form does dictate function.
Beginning with the trustee fiduciary duties to the beneficiaries of a trust, attorney Abbey Magnuson of Foley & Lardner’s Estate & Trusts Practice Group discusses ways to mitigate trustee liability in this 10-minute interview with Brian Lucareli. Abbey also emphasizes the role Family Offices play in the administration of trusts and how they can help lessen trustee liability issues.*Download file for a transcript of the interview. Press play to listen.
Zelle® is a fast and easy way to send and receive money with people you know and trust, like your babysitter, your fellow PTA mom, your son’s soccer coach, or your coworker. Whether you just enrolled with Zelle® or have been an active user for a while, there are a few tips you should always keep in mind to ensure you are being safe when sending money.
In Canada, as in many other jurisdictions, data breaches that pose a real risk of harm to individuals must be reported. Apart from class action liability, data breaches can trigger large fines and important reputational consequences. While the recent court decisions in Canada—where theft of personal information does not by itself entitle the victim to damages—are favorable for firms that suffer data breaches, firms still need robust cybersecurity safeguards to lessen their changes of being hacked, as data breaches have other costly consequences.
When setting up a family legacy plan that extends across generations, it’s vital to have a family governance plan that empowers a family to govern its wealth and enterprises as a cohesive unit. While each family is unique, the keys to incorporating an effective family governance will be uniting around shared purposes, having a written family constitution that sets forth broad principles and policies in areas that are identified by the family as needed, and keeping it separate from any operating business governance.