tax + family law blog

The following is excerpted from a paper by Edwin Davis and delivered at the 2014 Advanced Family Law Course in San Antonio. The complete paper can be downloaded here.

Evaluation of the financial condition of parties in a family law case can become a very detailed undertaking. As family lawyers, we need a starting place to assist us in the discovery process – request for production, interrogatories, depositions, etc. Overall, our best roadmap is the parties’ tax returns.

Year in, year out, parties must report their income and deductions to the Internal Revenue Service, and state their income source and category of […]

There is a right way and a wrong way to approach prenuptial and other marital agreements. “Bill,” a 45-year-old asset manager for a large international wealth management group, learned the hard way that hiring someone to handle a prenup correctly isn’t so easy.

In college, Bill’s hobby of analyzing, buying and selling stocks grew into a very lucrative career. Married to a beautiful woman for 20 years, with two children, Bill seems like the picture postcard of success. Behind the scenes, however, Bill’s marriage is a train wreck. It has taken the toll on his workaholic personality and contributed to progressive alcohol […]

Wealth is rarely created by accident, and neither is preservation of wealth. Large asset cases require a unique blend of accounting, tax and family law expertise and application.

With current income tax rates reaching almost 44%, it is easy to understand that “Uncle Sam” is the silent partner in every divorce case. Complex property division includes asset and debt determination, characterization, analysis, valuation and tax planning. Each stage of a case is an important foundation to the next.

Your divorce may be the largest financial deal you ever transact, and it is imperative that you treat it as such.

Since the Bush tax cuts of 2001 and 2003, the U.S. Income and Estate Tax planning arena has been a roller coaster ride for those with large assets. On January 2, 2013, the American Taxpayer Relief Act was signed into law, providing stability to planning for estate, gift, and generation-skipping transfers, with a Unified Tax Exemption of $5,120,000 indexed for inflation. With the inflation index, the Unified Tax Exemption for these transfers is now $5,430,000 in 2015. In addition, the Annual Gift Tax Exclusion for 2015 is $14,000. With these unprecedented tax exemptions, there may be no better time to […]