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I pray also that the eyes of your heart may be enlightened in order that you may know...the riches of his glorious inheritance in the saints... Ephesians 1:18b Two things strike me about this portion: saints and inheritance. First, if you are a Believer you’re a saint. You don’t need special Vatican blessings or pronouncements. The word saint means "consecrated to God, holy" (Acts 9:13; Acts 9:32; Acts 26:10; Philippians 4:21; Romans 16:2; Ephesians 4:12; Ephesians 5:3, to name a few instances of the word in the New Testament). It’s not only a term but a way of life, consecrated,...

Portland, Maine - An adult adoption involving lesbian partners and a claim to a share of a family fortune built on IBM has been annulled, bouncing the case to Maine's highest court. At issue is whether it was legal for a judge to allow Olive Watson to adopt Patricia Spado in 1991 in Knox County, where the longtime partners spent several weeks each summer on an island in Penobscot Bay. Watson was a daughter of Thomas Watson Jnr, who took International Business Machines Corp from punch cards into electronic computing. The relationship between Spado and Watson ended a year after...

I have a friend whose wife has Altzheimers. She's fortunate because hers is not the mean type. She smiles all the time and giggles a lot. But she's in a nursing home. He also has bad health and had to go to the same nursing home. I almost choked when he told me it was costing them $9000 a month for the two of them. He had to move out and move in with one of his children. She's still in the nursing home. What on earth can he do? Do they have any options?

Over the next 50 years, it's expected that $45 trillion will be transferred to heirs and charities via estates - the largest wealth transfer in history. How much of it is siphoned by trustees or lost to estate taxes, administrative fees, lawyers' fees, appraiser fees, accountants' fees or poor investment acumen surely will be a record, as well. Estate planning, in particular trusts and their administration by financial institutions, can be mind-numbingly complex. Talk of them turns on the unpleasant subject of death. But unless consumers remain vigilant - and technology is employed for checks and balances - assets will...

WASHINGTON - The House voted Thursday to cut taxes on inherited estates and relieve thousands of heirs from paying tax collectors beginning next decade. The 269-156 vote, just a few months before an election with control of Congress at stake, saw majority Republicans temporarily setting aside their ambition to abolish the tax. Instead, they voted to exempt from taxation individual estates up to $5 million and couple's estates up to $10 million, while also blunting the impact on even richer families. The compromise measure now goes to the Senate. The White House called the bill "a step in the right...

It doesn't matter if you are liberal or conservative, Democrat or Republican. There is no possible excuse for doing what Congress is poised to do this week: Abolish the estate tax. The federal government faces a future of expanding deficits. Thanks to the baby bust and medical inflation, spending is projected to rise by nearly 3 percent of gross domestic product by 2030, a growth equivalent to the doubling of today's Medicare program. What is the dumbest possible response to this? Take a source of revenue and abolish it outright. -snip- People often remark on the perversity of popular support...

Vanguard of the Revolution http://www.theVanguard.orgD-DAY FOR THE DEATH TAX by Rod D. Martin, 31 August 2005 Tuesday is D-Day. The Senate votes on whether to do what the House has long since done: end the Death Tax, the most obscene tax in America. And we may -- just may -- have the votes to win. Since its enactment in 1916, the Death Tax has actually cost more jobs and destroyed more small businesses and family farms than it’s raised in government revenue. That’s no accident. Death Tax proponents never meant their handiwork to raise real money: the levy was, from...

WALNUT CREEK - A mysterious little key, found tucked away in a dusty desk drawer, remains as confounding today as it was 13 years ago when Terry Ann Black found it. But while Black never learned what the key opened, she has used it to unlock a door and assist others in sorting out the estates of departed loved ones. Black, a Lafayette resident who has worked 40 years as a nurse, is the author of ``Caring Is Not Enough: The Most Important Questions You Can Ask,'' a self-published booklet that contains more than 70 questions everyone should answer. The...

...A recent study by... found that over 20 years the Joint Committee on Taxation] has always underestimated the revenues from tax hikes, while overestimating the revenues that are lost when taxes are cut.... The Joint Tax calculations of the "cost" of death tax repeal have been particularly wild and inexplicable. In 2001, JCT famously estimated that repeal would cost the Treasury $600 billion over 10 years -- twice as much as the death tax actually raises. The Joint Tax whiz kids built into their computer models the behavioral effects of lawyers working the interplay between the death and gift tax...

The audience was eager for the governor to put pen to paper. Some drooled. Catching the spirit of excitement, a few even lost control and barked. Canines of all sizes and a spotted rabbit named Roxy were among those gathered Friday at the Capitol to watch Gov. Linda Lingle sign into law a measure that allows residents to leave a trust for the care of their dog, cat, or other domestic animal. ADVERTISEMENT Lingle's two cats, Nani Girl and Stripes, were not in attendance. "As you know cats don't do as well in public settings like this as dogs do,"...

The clock is ticking. Unless Congress acts -- who knows? -- we could see a wave of suicides, patricides, matricides and rich-uncle killings in 2010. That's the year that the federal tax on estates -- also known as the "death tax," the most hated tax exacted by the U.S. Treasury -- will be repealed. If you die in 2010, you can pass along all your assets to your heirs without a penny to Uncle Sam. But the repeal recedes. If you die after 2010, only $1 million of your estate is exempt from tax, and the rest gets hit with...

Social Insecurity... cartoon by FReeper IPWGOP (aka Linda Eddy) click here for really large versionThis is an email-able, copyright-ready graphic you can use in emails, on blogs, in flyers, on posters... anything that's noncommercial.  Three great lies about Social Security Editorial by: Roger Wm. Hughes There are three great lies about Social Security that are taken as truths. The first great lie is that those who are currently receiving Social Security benefits are just drawing their own money out of the system. This is not true because the Social Security System has always been a pay-as-you-go system. The first retirees who...

A CAT which inherited £450,000 has been moved to a secret safe house after a series of death threats. Tinker was given a £350,000 three-bedroom house and £100,000 when widow Margaret Layne died aged 89 last year. But now neighbours Eugene and Ann Wheatley, trustees of his fortune, have moved the moggy from Harrow, North London. Mr Wheatley, 77, said: "He is safe now in a place in mid-Wales but I dare not say where exactly. "After the news of Tinker's inheritance we got hundreds of calls from people jealous of his money. It was horrible." Tinker had been a...

I have received a letter from Pat Cohen Esquire, Christian and US citizen notifying me that I am a beneficiary of $750,000 from Strom Thurmond's estate because of all the good deeds I've done (apparently not anonymously enough). It is being held in Wellington House in Cambridge by FX International ROYAL AND SCOTTISH GROUP. (RSG Fiduciaries or the RSG Fiduciary Bank in London. I am waiting instructions for how to transfer the funds, but I think I'd rather just pick them up in person. It says I may be released the money by any means I desire.

AP-A federal appeals court Thursday threw out a judge's ruling that awarded $88.5 million to former Playboy model Anna Nicole Smith from the estate of her late husband, an oil tycoon who died at age 90 just over a year after they wed.

Last year, singer Melissa Etheridge promised to love and protect her new partner, actress Tammy Lynn Michaels, until death do them part, but she may not be able to leave her songs to Michaels. U.S. copyright law discriminates against homosexuals by not allowing songwriters and other artists to determine conclusively who gets the rights to their work at the time of their death. No matter what an artist's intention, spouses, children and grandchildren, in that order, are the first in line to recapture the copyrights, followed by next of kin, executors and administrators. Since most states do not recognize gay...

WASHINGTON - Sen. John Kerry, whose wife is enormously wealthy, inherited three trusts from his mother last year, according to a financial disclosure report released Friday. After the death of his mother, Rosemary Forbes Kerry, last November, the Massachusetts Democrat inherited three trusts with between $300,000 and $1.5 million in assets. The holdings include between $66,000 and $165,000 in U.S. Treasury bonds as well as thousands of dollars in stocks, ranging from General Electric Co. and Merck & Co. to 3M Co. and Proctor & Gamble. Rosemary Kerry, who was 89 when she died, was a member of Boston's wealthy...

The grandson of J R R Tolkien, the author of The Lord of the Rings books, has spoken for the first time of the family feud that has seen him excluded from managing the writer's literary estate. In an exclusive interview with The Telegraph today, Simon Tolkien speaks about the five-year dispute and how his father, Christopher, has turned his back on him and his children. He also discloses how a minor disagreement over the Hollywood adaptations of the books contributed to his exclusion from the board of the family firm. He said: "My father is very angry with me...

Kevin Phillips's new book, "Wealth and Democracy," is a 422-page doorstopper, but much of the book's message is contained in one stunning table. That table, in the middle of a chapter titled "Millennial Plutographics," reports the compensation of America's 10 most highly paid C.E.O.'s in 1981, 1988 and 2000. In 1981 those captains of industry were paid an average of $3.5 million, which seemed like a lot at the time. By 1988 the average had soared to $19.3 million, which seemed outrageous. But by 2000 the average annual pay of the top 10 was $154 million. It's true that wages...

Would the posting police, in advance, give me a break for this vanity. I've been around here long enough to know how things work, but I simply could not get the response posting under general that I may get here.