16 Nov 2018
Posted by Tom Virkler 
This article speaks to a ready market. Why? Because statistics suggest that 80% of all small and mid-sized businesses in the country have made no adequate plans for transition in the event of one owner’s retirement, long-term disability, or premature death. And “adequate” includes being properly...
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06 Nov 2018
Posted by Tom Virkler 
A television ad from a few years back had an auto mechanic, portrayed as somewhat of a rube, looking at an imported automobile and saying, “Let me do it! I’ve never fixed a foreign muffler before!” The commercial sponsor was a company whose only service was muffler replacement and repair and their...
Read more → 30 Oct 2018
Posted by Tom Virkler 
Let’s talk about federal estate taxes. Back in the old days the first spouse to die had to use the lifetime estate tax exemption at death or lose it. In the discussion that follows assume a $1,000,000 exemption where the husband dies first. If the husband left everything to the wife protected by the unlimited...
Read more → 23 Oct 2018
Posted by Tom Virkler 
When discussing and designing executive bonus plans, too much time is lost talking about and describing “single bonus” and “double-bonus” methods, and too many cases may be lost because they haven’t been discussed at all. Just a quick study of vanilla executive bonus: The employer, (ER) agrees...
Read more → 16 Oct 2018
Posted by Tom Virkler 
Dr. James Stuart Pritchard had a pretty good resume. After graduating from the Toronto Medical School he moved across the border to Michigan and became a highly-regarded physician specializing in chest, lung and bronchial disorders. He was the president and general director of the prestigious W.K....
Read more → 09 Oct 2018
Posted by Tom Virkler 
You can’t eat your cake and have it, too! We’ve all said it many times and in every case we were talking about more than just desserts. Layered within the phrase is the more subtle and intended message that you can’t have it both ways; or that to get something you’ve got to give up something...
Read more → 02 Oct 2018
Posted by Tom Virkler 
Nothing saps the thrill of owning a sassy new automobile more than the increased premiums on the car insurance that are about half the amount of the monthly payment on your Little Deuce Coupe. And those nifty printer/scanner/copier/faxing machines that they are practically giving away at Paper-clips...
Read more → 25 Sep 2018
Posted by Tom Virkler 
Thank goodness for grocery store tabloids! They report news weeks before a story even breaks in the mainstream media. And for a time, it seemed almost impossible to get through the checkout line without perusing at least one front-page article about some celebrity’s close encounter of the third kind. But...
Read more → 18 Sep 2018
Posted by Tom Virkler 
Okay, let’s start with a few premises and see where it leads: Love is blind/ Marriage is an institution/ Love and marriage go together/ Therefore, marriage is an institution for the blind. I don’t know if Aristotle would approve of the structure of that syllogism, but it does illustrate that when...
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11 Sep 2018
Posted by Tom Virkler 
The most common strategy that wealthy and healthy taxpayers use to fund against unavoidable anticipated estate tax liability is to purchase life insurance in an irrevocable trust; funding the trust with gifts so the trustee can pay the premiums. Transfers to the trust can be protected from gift taxation...
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