My Business Logic

There is a lot to be gained from business planning but many businesses will search for a million reasons to avoid it. However large or small your business is, planning for the future is critical to its success.

Apart from the obvious benefits of setting your stall out for the year ahead, creating an annual strategy will motivate, inspire and focus you on what needs to be done and when.

The Department of Trade and Industry estimates that at least 10,000 businesses fail in the UK each year and many are doomed due to poor planning. So what is the first step you need to take to ensure that your business does not become one of these statistics?

Plan Plan Plan!

When considering the content for your business plan, reflect on the following practical tips to ensure your business starts the year positively and achieves record results.

Be organised

If you have been in business for over a year, the first step is to review your performance of the previous years trading.

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A couple of days ago I blogged about the dangers of bad estate planning, and presented a hierarchy of worst to best ways to plan.  Today I’m providing a list of 10 of the most overlooked issues in estate planning (things that frequently aren’t dealt with in lesser methods of planning).  Many plans will address some of these items, but it’s a rare plan that has adequately covered everything.  The most important thing is that the person doing the planning is informed of all of the issues.  That way they can make an educated decision that certain things need or need not be provided for in their particular plan.  Here’s the list, in no particular order:

1.  Probate – not considering court fees, attorneys fees, delay, frustration, etc. of a

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From a presentation I gave last week for Duke University’s OLLI program’s course on retirement and wealth management, here are 10 things NOT to do in terms of estate planning:

1. Jointly own large bank or brokerage accounts.
2. Leave assets directly to a minor child or incapacitated person.
3. Forget to fund your living trust.
4. Name your estate as the beneficiary of your IRA or other retirement account.
5. Forget to have your plan reviewed every few years.
6. Forget to coordinate your beneficiary designations with your plan
7. Lose your original documents (it happens more often than you would think).
8. Rely on non-experts for advice.
9. Underestimate the value of using an estate planning specialist.
10. Use the ostrich approach to estate planning.  (This is the most common method of planning/lack thereof!)

The reasons for most of these is obvious, others maybe not so much.  The best thing you can do to learn more is to consult with an estate planning attorney.

The 2010 tax year is three-fourths over for most of us. By now, we should have a decent idea of what sort of year we’re having, so it’s time to get serious about our year-end tax planning.

The president this week signed a new law that could make a big difference in your 2010 tax planning. Some key provisions:

$500,000 Section 179 deduction limit.  The tax law normally requires taxpayers to capitalize equipment costs and recover them only over time through depreciation. Section 179 allows taxpayers to elect to deduct the entire cost of most assets in the year they are placed in service. The tax law prior to now limited the deduction in a year to $250,000 worth of qualifying assets. For 2010 and 2011, that limit is raised to $500,000, if no more than $2 million of assets are placed in service during the year.

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Successful estate planning generally involves passing on your assets to your heirs at a low tax cost. To help achieve that goal, there are a few things to keep in mind about retirement accounts.

Required Minimum Distribution Facts

• Under tax law, you cannot keep money in a traditional IRA indefinitely. Eventually, it must be distributed. The amount that must be distributed each year is referred to as the required minimum distribution.
• If there are no distributions, or if the distributions are not large enough, you may have to pay a 50 percent excise tax on the amount not distributed as required.
• The requirements for distributing IRA funds differ, depending on whether you are the IRA owner or the beneficiary of a decedent’s IRA.
• Beneficiaries take distributions based on IRS tables that predict life expectancy.

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