Word: trusts
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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More and more lawyers are now advising clients to set up "revocable inter vivos [living] trusts," which in effect act as a conduit during a man's lifetime for the transfer of his property to his heirs. The creator of such a trust, however, retains full control of it, and as a result he escapes federal gift taxes, though not estate or income taxes on whatever the trust earns. He can change the trust as he pleases until he dies. The trust thus takes the place of a will-and all property that goes into it bypasses probate...
...Avoid Probate (Crown; $4.95). Written by Norman F. Dacey, who calls himself "America's best-known estate planner," the hefty paperback consists of a 50-page blast at lawyers and 300 pages of assorted forms that readers are urged to use in setting up revocable living trusts. In Dacey's version, a man puts most of his estate into life insurance, makes a bank trustee but directs the bank to invest the estate in a mutual fund. While the bank pays his heirs out of the trust income, the mutual fund turns a tidy profit in assorted fees...
...A.B.A. itself sponsors a far sounder predecessor of Dacey's primer - a highly sophisticated film, written and narrated for U.S. lawyers by Harvard Law Professor A. James Casner, one of the country's top trust experts. To really beat probate, Casner stresses that the creator must "fund" a revocable living trust with as much as possible of his income-producing property before he dies-the more the better. Setting up such a trust may cost more than probate in lawyers' fees, trustees' fees and stock-transfer taxes. Even so, in many cases the trust can save...
...behavior of the sage. Written contracts are usually mere pieces of paper. "No Chinese would understand Shylock's claim to a pound of flesh in The Merchant of Venice," says Harvard Law Professor Jerome Cohen. "The important thing is human relations. You imply a lack of trust when you allow for disputes in contracts." If disputes arise, they are settled through face-to-face negotiations or through an intermediary, who will seek a compromise rather than a victory for the "right...
...stream that he had contrived, by means of pumps, to recirculate uphill. Then they wandered through the rooms of Chartwell, the manor house in Kent where Sir Winston Churchill happily wrote, painted, puttered and sometimes governed from 1922 onward. Bought in 1947 by friends and presented to the National Trust, Chartwell passed to the nation at his death early last year. Now, for four shillings, the public may visit the place where, as he wrote, "I never had a dull or idle moment from morning till midnight...