The holidays are approaching and to make it a more relaxed and enjoyable season, it helps to plan in advance and know the best practices for holiday planning, entertaining, gift giving, entertaining, and decorating.
Family Office Best Practices
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When former First Lady Nancy Reagan passed away in March 2016, millions of Americans mourned the loss. While the events honoring Mrs. Reagan unfurled seamlessly, a dedicated team was hard at work behind the scenes to ensure the funeral was being conducted to Mrs. Reagan’s expressed desires. The preparations and demands of the funeral may seem extreme, but many of Mrs. Reagan's concerns apply to other families of wealth and should be addressed.
Most family offices that serve U.S. families are well aware that special planning considerations can arise when a U.S. citizen family member marries a noncitizen. Should the client’s estate plan be revised to incorporate a qualified domestic trust (QDOT) to ensure that assets passing to the surviving noncitizen spouse qualify for federal estate tax marital deduction?
For family offices of all profiles—large and small, established and brand new—there are dozens of technology solutions available. In the first of the Family Office Series report, the focus is on technology, a topic that some families find daunting and neglect at their own risk. To simplify the landscape, the report identifies key reasons why family offices may need technology solutions and offer a review of the leading platforms and solution-providers currently available.
The cloud is one of the largest drivers of emerging technology solutions, and for many organizations, it has become one of their most valuable information technology (IT) tools. It enhances data storage capabilities, security and agility to both scale up as well as scale down, while also reducing costs, in part due to its inherent flexibility and the number of potential options. Forward-thinking organizations should be analyzing and making decisions about using the cloud by prioritizing capability, performance, total cost and availability against other solutions.
Since the issuance of the original ASU 2014-09, Revenue from Contracts with Customers, there has been several changes to that guidance, and additional limited changes are in process. The degree to which a particular entity’s revenue will be affected depends on its own facts and circumstances.
Owner-managed and family-owned businesses are often faced with the quandary of how to effectively motivate their teams to build and maintain value for the enterprise. Incentivizing employees for the long haul can be confusing territory, and owners should know that options are available in the gray area between cash bonuses and equity ownership. Offering creative packages that link employees to the growth of the company can have an immediate, positive impact on a company's cultural and financial future.
The acceleration of technological innovations and the challenges associated with adapting to them seem to point toward a tumultuous future. That future appears to be approaching faster than ever. Companies are finding it harder to maintain their positions in industries that are increasingly subject to disruption. And while investors may not be able to pinpoint precisely which companies or industries will lead the disruption—or fall victim to it—they should do what they can to plan to take advantage of these opportunities when they arise.
The 5th edition of the Social Divide index reveals that FTSE 100 companies are sharing more and better financial results-related posts on social media, assembling the right mix of social ingredients to achieve significantly higher levels of engagement than ever before. Indeed, in a clear indication of increasing stakeholder appetite for receiving results-related communication via social media channels, there was a 105% increase in interactions with results content in comparison to 2015.
Legal developments in digital currencies, including bitcoin, emerge almost on a daily basis across the global landscape. While in Argentina virtual currencies are not legal tender under the country’s National Constitution, in Croatia there are informal statements by the Croatian National Bank that look favorably on the legality of bitcoin. In Estonia, bitcoin income is treated as capital gains, and in Australia, virtual currency transactions are subject to goods and services taxes.