dsmWealth January 16, 2020

Attorney Breanna Young says costly pitfalls can be avoided with a durable power of attorney for financial affairs.

Don't Put Off Adding a Power of Attorney

BY STEVE DINNEN

If you think you need not bother with a power of attorney until you’re old or infirm, please rethink that position.

Ill health and misfortune can strike at any time, and if you’re in any way incapacitated and unable to make decisions about your financial or medical well-being, a power of attorney will be very useful to those who care about you.

Consider what can happen without a POA. A few years back, a farmer in western Iowa lost his wife, which prompted a discussion between his two sons as to how to proceed with the farming operations. The son who lived on the property wanted to continue, while the nonresident son wished to sell. During the discussions it came up that perhaps a power of attorney for financial affairs would help guide Dad. Enter the lawyers.

While Dad was trying to decide whether to draft a POA, he had a stroke and was rendered unable to consider such a document. So it was then determined that a conservatorship was needed. Enter more lawyers. And of course, Dad needed a guardian ad litem to protect his interests, which necessitated, yep, more lawyers.

Eventually, the situation got sorted out. But by then Dad had to sell a slice of the farm to pay all those lawyers. Breanna Young, herself a lawyer, said most of those woes could have been avoided had a durable power of attorney for financial affairs been in place. Sadly, Young sees this happen in her practice, at the Davis Brown law firm in Des Moines, where she works on estates and trusts.

Powers of attorney are simple documents, Young says. (They can even be downloaded from the internet for free; make sure you get ones that apply to your state of residence.) In the event you are unable to make medical care decisions for yourself, a POA grants someone else the power to do so. A financial POA does likewise for financial affairs. It can be very broad or very limited in scope—for instance, to only give a POA authority to handle real estate transactions but not gain access to your banking accounts.

You can lug copies of these documents with you when you travel. Or you can find a law firm such as Davis Brown that will transmit copies to requesting parties should the need arise.

Consider the Business of Employee Bonuses

BY STEVE DINNEN

If you paid workers a holiday bonus, did you think about why you do it? Bonuses can be set up as an informal profit-sharing mechanism, or merely as a way to reward your staff for the dedication and hard work they’ve put into making your business a success during the year.

You have latitude in structuring the payout. You can make it a percentage of the worker’s pay. Or make it a flat amount for everyone, or based on the number of years of service. That’s the route chosen by St. John Properties, a Baltimore property developer, when it handed $10 million worth of one-time bonus checks to its 198 employees. While the average amount paid out was $50,000, the tenure-dependent range went from a whopping $270,000 to $100 for the guy who apparently had been hired just days earlier.

Performance bonuses also crop up around the end of the year. Krista Lindholm, business development manager at business services company Oasis, a Paychex Co., in West Des Moines, says they’re more complex and should be tied to individual performance that aligns with the performance of the firm. Such a program should be clearly explained to employees ahead of time so they know what to work for, and what goals to reach.

Google Reveals Recent Top Trending Travel Destinations

BY MONICA BUCHANAN PITRELLI for CNBC's Global Traveler

Google's "Year in Search 2019" showed the travel destinations that had the highest spikes in searches in the U.S. over the past year. The list shows what’s trending — not necessarily what’s most popular — so don’t be surprised if your favorite Caribbean island or mouse-themed amusement park didn’t make the list. Instead, Google taps into the changes in the zeitgeist, revealing the places where Americans went, or simply aspired to go, more in 2019 than in the past. So what’s hot? Americans searched for "trip to …" these 10 places. >> READ MORE

Are You Among the World's Top 1%?

By DANIEL KURT for Investopedia

Several years ago, the "Occupy" movement spotlighted income inequality around the globe. While the protesters have since retreated from Wall Street and other economic power centers, this pressing issue lingers on. In fact, economic disparity is on the climb, with 1% of the world’s population currently holding over 47% of the global wealth, according to Credit Suisse’s 2018 Global Wealth Report.

Interestingly, Americans do not have to be extremely wealthy in order to claim a spot among that 1%. According to the Global Rich List, a $32,400 annual income will easily place American schoolteachers, registered nurses and other modestly salaried individuals among the global 1% of earners.

Contrarily, the top 1% of wage earners strictly in the United States must pull in at least $421,926 to make the cut, according to a 2018 report by the Economic Policy Institute. >> READ MORE