Trusteed IRAs

IRAs can often end up being a very large portion of your estate that immediately transfers at death to the listed beneficiaries. If you have concerns that transferring a large amount of funds to an heir that is not as responsible as you might have hoped for or if you hope to spread the distributions out over a very long period of time, there are options available to you.

This article addresses one of the vehicles you can use to match your estate in a manner that best fits your legacy. Controlling IRAs from the grave is challenging, but certainly possible using fairly simple or very complex trusts. It is important we work with your attorney or one from our professional alliance to make sure your estate is properly set-up to match your legacy desires.

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Holiday Traditions

We love decorating for the holidays so our tradition is to have our long-time friend Marc over for Thanksgiving dinner and spend the rest of the weekend decorating for the holidays. Rocke smokes a turkey breast on the Big Green Egg and we stuff a turkey as well, leaving many leftovers for everyone.

Rocke and I are spending our thirty-fifth holiday together and over the years our holiday traditions have changed. When we were first together we spent Thanksgiving with Rocke’s family and Christmas with mine. When Rocke’s mother passed away the tradition changed. We called my parents to see if they would like to join us for Thanksgiving, but were rebuffed with, “we now have our own tradition of lobster for two.”

We have spent the last several years remodeling our kitchen and living room and this year we changed our holiday decorations colors to match the new look. We pulled apart over a hundred white silk poinsettias; spray painted the white parts red and put them back together again. It was a great deal of work but we were pleased with the final result. Once they are done it is only a matter of pulling them from the boxes and hanging them up. It was fun coming up with the new look but we hope to not to have to do it again within the next decade.

RockCandy Favorite Recipes: Root Vegetables Gratin with Gruyère

Thanksgiving dinner is the time we pull our winter recipes out and one of our favorites is this gratin. It is extremely rich so we often make a half a recipe and only use a 9X9-baking dish. It also freezes well after baking, so you can vacuum pack servings sizes to freeze and then enjoy with future meals.

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14% to 17% Ten Year Annualized Returns

When you look at the 10-year rolling returns for the S&P 500 from 1926 to 2009 you will see that the recoveries following the last major corrections were followed by a 20 year period of 14.86% annualized returns and a 26 year period of 17.19% annualized returns. We do not know what tomorrow may bring, but history shows that optimism for the future is not an unreasonable position.