May you live in interesting times. Although that sounds like an ancient blessing, it’s believed to be a Chinese curse casting instability and uncertainty on the person who hears it.
Blessing or curse, it’s a great description of the year we’ve just come through, and in spite of all the turmoil, there are some things you can do before the end of 2020 to take advantage of all the madness. Strauss Attorneys PLLC has come up with a list of estate planning insights, cautions, and opportunities for you to consider.
• Falling Values: some assets, be they business, real estate, or stock, have decreased in value over the past year. It may be a good time to transfer those depreciated assets to a younger generation and let the assets regain their value in their hands, and

Planning for retirement. We spend most of our working career preparing for it, saving for it, covering every contingency. When you finally wave goodbye to the company, you’re ready for all that planning to take over. But does your planning take into account the taxes you’ll have to pay on your retirement income? It’s one of the biggest retirement planning mistakes people make.
Anqui Chen and Alicia H. Munnell at the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College analyzed data from the most recent federal Health and Retirement Study. They published their findings in a preliminary paper, How Much Taxes Will Retirees Owe on Their Retirement Income. Chen and Munnell say that retiree households will pay approximately 6 percent of their retirement income in federal

Death tax, inheritance tax, estate tax—call it what you will, they all mean that some government entity wants to put its hand in your pocket or your heirs’ pockets, after your demise.
On the federal level, the estate tax issue is not as big a deal as it was back in the day. Today individuals can pass on more than $11 million and couples can pass on more than $23 million before Washington comes after your money.
17 states, on the other hand, have not moderated their position on estate and inheritance taxes. According to the Tax Foundation, Connecticut, Hawaii, Illinois, Maine, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New York, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont, Washington and the District of Columbia all charge an estate tax, which is levied on the value of the deceased’s assets

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Alhambra’s’ Bob Williams describes Charitable Remainder Trusts and how they can be used as a planning tool to create a win-win for you and charities.

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What The PMIs Aren’t Really Saying, In China As Elsewhere
China’s PMI’s continue to impress despite the fact they continue to be wholly unimpressive. As with most economic numbers in today’s stock-focused obsessiveness, everything is judged solely by how much it “surprises.” Surprises who? Doesn’t matter; some faceless group of analysts and Economists whose short-term modeling has somehow become the very standard of performance.

Monthly Market Monitor – July 2020
Most Long-Term Trends Have Not

You spend a lifetime earning, saving, acquiring. But the old adage is true—you can’t take it with you. So, what do you do with your assets when you’re gone? How do you want them distributed? That’s where a good estate plan comes in. However, some estate plans are based on ideas that just aren’t true. Plans are made based on emotion rather than logic, and that’s where the best-laid estate plans can go wrong.
Christopher D. Wright, JD is a CPA at Marks Paneth LLP. In more than 30 years of helping clients develop estate plans, he’s discovered 5 common misconceptions that should be avoided.
Myth #1:  An estate plan should be based solely on tax mitigation
No one likes to pay taxes and when you’re gone you want to leave as much to your heirs as possible, but escaping

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Alhambra CEO Joe Calhoun and Alhambra’s Bob Williams look at data from the past month and discuss what it means for the economy.

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Monthly Market Monitor – July 2020
Most Long-Term Trends Have Not Changed. A lot has changed over the last 4 months since the COVID virus started to impact the global economy. Asia was infected first with China at ground zero. Their economy succumbed first with a large part of the country shut down to a degree that can only be accomplished in an authoritarian regime.

Monthly Macro Monitor – August 2020
One of the advantages we enjoy here at Alhambra is the opportunity to interact with a lot of investors. We talk to

“Will I outlive my money?” That’s one of the biggest concerns for most retirees. There’s the high cost of medical care, which gets more expensive all the time. There’s inflation, which raises the cost of goods and services, eating into your retirement budget. And then, there’s taxes, which are as certain as death, and the politicians who want to raise them.
So, if taxes are an issue where you live, and you’re thinking about moving to a place that’s more economically friendly to your retirement savings—where do you go?
There are nine states that have no state income taxes:  Alaska, Florida, Nevada, New Hampshire, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Washington, and Wyoming.
With no state income tax, you don’t have to worry about paying taxes on distributions from

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5 Tax Strategies to Help you Hold on to Your Money in Retirement
What is retirement, really? We think we know. So, we do our best to prepare for both current circumstances and as many surprises as we can conjure up.  After all, with people living longer than ever before your money has to last longer than ever before.

Gratuitously Impatient (For a) Rebound
Jay Powell’s 2018 case for his economic “boom”, the one which was presumably behind his hawkish aggression, rested largely upon the unemployment rate alone. A curiously thin roster for a period of purported economic acceleration, one of the few sets joining that particular headline statistic in