Tax deductible retirement plans for trial lawyers

Ok, if you are a trial lawyer and last week you had a painful conversation with your CPA or tax professional about the amount of tax you owed, or how depleted your retirement account is, then you absolutely need to contact my office and learn more about some options only available to trial lawyers.

This weeks edition of Speaking of Settlements gives you a quick look at how trial lawyers and litigators can accomplish the following:

• Convert taxable income into fully tax deductible income by taking advantage of structured legal fees and certain retirement plan options.
• Remove all market risk from your retirement planning and know in advance exactly how much retirement income you will have at a certain age, regardless of market performance.
• Cut your current tax bill by the tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars by doing some very basic and simple advance planning.

As I state in the video, this is not some esoteric plan that is going to give your CPA a heart attack or keep you up at night wondering when the IRS is going to knock on your door. No, this is plan that is based on long standing tax law and principals that allow trial lawyers to defer their taxable income into future years, guarantee those payments and then direct them into exceptionally conservative guaranteed benefit retirement plans.

It's a basic plan, it works like nothing else in the financial community but you have to speak with an expert BEFORE your case settles in order to take full advantage of it.

If your tax bill is killing you and your retirement plans are a mess, please contact my office at Wahlstrom & Associates and lets talk about how you can begin to clean up this disaster. Lets face it, the last few years have been hard on trial lawyers bank accounts, but you have a chance to fix it and get control over your finances if you simply plan ahead and systematically convert some of your current legal fees into guaranteed future income.

You only have yourself to blame if you are paying too much in taxes and your retirement plan is something that keeps you up at night. The solution is staring you in the face, you just have to get educated and put the plan in motion.

IRS looks at final rules on tax free status of structured settlements

In this weeks edition of Speaking of Settlements I look back at the recent hearings in Washington, DC where in the US Treasury had invited comment on the final rules related to the taxation of structured settlements, going all the way back to when the last modification to section 104(a)(2) was made in 1996.

As I commented in a previous video, in which Jack Meligan of SPI weighed in, that these hearings were flying very much under the radar in the settlement and tax community, despite the fact that this represented a great opportunity to speak with Treasury about expanding tax free status or clarification on sexual abuse, molestation and wrongful imprisonment.

There was a lot of comment and controversy about the fact that Attorney Dick Risk submitted a request to use the hearings to discuss Treasury's long standing decision to "not decide" on the topic of single claimant Qualified Settlement Funds, or 468B Trusts. Most of the feed back I got from that video and column was that it was the wrong forum to bring this up, while many in the SSP felt that the letter to the committee by NSSTA stating that they represent the opinion of "virtually all structured settlement producers, both defense and plaintiff" was a bit of a reach and not reflective of reality either.

So, today's video gives you a brief update, but as I state in the commentary, we have provided the full and complete transcript of the hearings, the positions put forth by John McColloch of IFS ( Integrated Financial Services ) are right there in the transcript, as are the other responses by NSSTA, SSP and Dick Risk.

Make up your own minds, read the information and decide for yourself if you think this was the appropriate forum to discuss the single claimant QSF issue, Treasury's reaction to it and the chances of expanding clear tax free status to sexual abuse and wrongful imprisonment cases.



Are annuities being overhyped? Structured settlement expert Mark Wahlstrom answers the question.

This question was asked in a recent Wall Street Journal article authored by writers Anne Turgesen and Leslie Scism, with the theme being that the recent news of promotion of annuities by the Obama administration is turning into marketing bonanza for life insurance agents  that could harm some investors.

A link to the full WSJ article is available by clicking here.

While I feel the headline was a little extreme, the premise of their story is dead on. That being that a rush to move people into fixed rate, immediate income annuities at the current historically low rates is going to hurt a lot of people long term when rates and inflation inevitably rise over the next 3 to 7 years.

In this weeks edition of Speaking of Settlements, I discuss this dilemma, which is faced by structured settlement experts such as myself on a daily basis. We all know that current interest rates are historically very low and will certainly go up over the next few years, but investors, savers or injury victims need to make decisions TODAY on whether or not immediate annuity income makes sense for them right now.

This will be part of a recurring series of conversations I will be having on the ideas and strategies for those looking to use annuities to fund or finance retirement, care plans, settlement plans and other conservative income strategies using insurance company products.