In a private letter ruling recently, the IRS addressed the issue of transferring an inherited IRA into a Special Needs Trust. The law around taxation of inherited IRAs and the interaction with trusts has been unpredictable and fast-moving for several years now.

Fortunately, this private letter ruling indicates the direction the IRS is headed on two important questions:

First, the transfer to the SNT was not a taxable transfer for estate and gift tax purposes. That’s great! It means that if a person with special needs inherits an IRA, we can still do some limited planning without immediate tax consequences.

Second, the trustee was able to stretch out the distributions from the IRA (and therefore stretch out the tax deferral benefits) over the life expectancy of the beneficiary. Another positive result.

Of course, the best result would have been achieved if the decedent had made the IRA payable to the SNT directly. That way, court costs, private letter ruling costs, anxiety, and a “pay back to the state” provision all could have been avoided.

At the height of stock market frenzies, millions of eyes are glued to the ticker: the thin strip that recites stock prices as they rise and fall.

Ambitious entrepreneurs have set out to do something like the stock market ticker for home prices with the new website Zillow. The creators use home sale prices to estimate the value of (evenutally) every home in America. You can have a bit of fun right now by clicking on Zillow and typing in your home address.

The site is still new and no one is advised to rely on the estimates for decision-making. But for real estate investors, it’s an easy and efficient way to roughly estimate an area’s comparables.

An out-of-state court recently found that an attorney who did not work in the estate planning area should not have dabbled. He bought a form will, modified it and presented it to an elderly relative for signature. The beneficiary was her relative-caretaker (a dangerous will under California law). The attorney didn’t ask her about other relatives who might not like the will that left everything to one person.

The will ended up in court. The litigators got paid first, the named beneficiary got 40% of what was left, and the relatives got the rest. The attorney was suspended for failure to provide competent representation and to avoid conflicts of interest.

You can download the case opinion here.

It’s not every day that an attorney from Westlake Village, California is quoted in the New York Times, but that was my experience today. Reporter Hillary Chura quoted me in an article about time management. You can read it here. I’d like to say more about it, but I’m late for my next appointment!

It’s hard work to be a judge. At the end of each case, at least one party (and more likely both parties) is unhappy. You have to sit and watch bad lawyering, hostility, and sometimes downright childishness all day long. Except on the days when you have to do paperwork and read petitions and filings, not always well-written.

Who can blame a Florida federal court for treating the misbehaving attorneys appearing before it like children? Judge Presnell ordered the contesting attorneys to engage in an “Alternative Form of Dispute Resolution” known to us all: a game of Rock, Paper, Scissors.

Read the court’s order, here.

For those of you who enjoy a humorous but substantial approach to advocacy, check out Mothers From Hell 2 .

Your father, at 87, should have given up his license and stopped driving a few years ago. So while you were sad to learn that he’d gotten into a car accident, you weren’t surprised. What did surprise you and your mom was that their auto insurance limits of $50,000 were not nearly enough to pay for the damage. Now your mom and dad are faced with losing their home. Is there anything they can do? Not safely. Once the accident has occurred, it’s too late to increase insurance limits and its too late to protect assets. “Fradulent Transfer” law is the federal law that protects creditors from debtors giving away their assets when the creditor comes to get paid.

But what about you? Your teenaged son is driving your car and you know he’s inexperienced. He hasn’t been in an accident, but some of his friends have and you suspect he drives too fast. What can you do? A lot. When you plan before a disaster occurs, you can legally take effective protective steps.

A recent 9th Circuit case, United States v. Townley, has attorneys all over the country commenting. The court held that the asset protection planning the Townley’s did to avoid potential creditors was not legitimate and was a fraudulent transfer. This goes against the general principal that you can protect against potential claims.

However, if we look closer, we see some good reasons for the court’s holding — reasons that families would do well to keep in mind. It is not enough to rely on general principals such as “you can do asset protection to avoid potential creditors.” Always remember the court’s power to rip through planning it considers abusive.

The Townleys claimed, as many before them have also done unsuccessfully, that there is a constitutional prohibition on income tax. Eventually the I.R.S. caught up with them and claimed the assets they had transferred. The Townleys argued that their transfer was to avoid any claims that might arise out of Mr. Townley’s work with troubled boys rather than to defraud the I.R.S. This is a difficult argument to believe since at the time they made the transfer, they were already refusing to pay income taxes.

Mr. & Mrs. Townley failed the straight-face test. But what if you are doing everything a reasonable person would?

Where is the line? Most courts have held that when a claim is “reasonably forseeable” and “in the immediate future,” you cannot shield your assets from it. What is the “immediate future”? Well, a cap of sorts has been provided by the Bankruptcy and Consumer Protection Act of 2005. That act allows creditors to target fraudulent transfers undertaken within the 10 years previous to the bankruptcy.

“Conservative Asset Protection” is not an oxymoron. You can take steps to protect your assets without becoming the target of fraudulent transfer claims. Here are a few keys:

• Increase insurance limits, including umbrella policy limits.
• Do not transfer everything. Make sure that excluding the protected assets, your net worth is still positive.
• “Carve out” access to the protected assets for any current creditors.
• Maintain your asset protection vehicle carefully and respectfully as a separate entity.
• Don’t play games with the I.R.S.