Since 1998, Mr. Givens has practiced as an attorney and an accountant in Florence, Columbia, and Sumter, South Carolina. As an attorney, Mr. Givens has practiced in the areas of business law, nonprofit law, all types of taxation, estate planning, wills, trusts, probate administration and litigation and civil litigation.
Mr. Kolb is a 1974 graduate of the University of South Carolina Law School (JD), and a 1971 graduate of the University of South Carolina (BS in Business Administration). He is admitted to practice law before all courts in the State of South Carolina and before the US District Court. He has been recognized as an outstanding and experienced personal injury trial lawyer and criminal defense trial lawyer.
Glenn F. Givens is a native of Sumter, South Carolina and joined Kolb & Givens Attorneys at Law, LLC in November, 2010. Mr. Givens provides legal advice on Business Entities, Estate Planning, Trusts, Wills, Probate Administration and Taxation. Mr. Givens handles the following types of cases...
Wills
Trusts
You can use a trust to avoid probate. To use a trust in avoiding probate, you would set up a revocable living trust and fund the trust before you die with enough assets and the type of assets that would allow you to avoid probate. Assets can pass a variety of different ways and avoid probate. These ways include expiration of a life estate, through a surviving joint owner, under a beneficiary designation or simply by not having enough assets to warrant having an estate go through probate. If one is an owner in fee simple of real property or a portion of real property or individually owns greater than $25,000.00 of personal property at the time of death, one's estate must go through probate. Now, if you have assets that cannot avoid probate without using a trust or you do not want to avoid probate through other means besides using a trust, then you can set up a revocable living trust and put those assets into the trust (fund the trust) before you die thereby avoiding probate with such assets when you die.
Power of Attorney
Probate
Areas of practice include serious personal injury and accident cases, criminal defense, DUI, product liability, workers compensation claims, estate and probate law, taxation, traffic violations and general civil litigation.
This article pertains to one of the lesser known benefits of the new estate tax law, the Deceased Spousal Unused Exemption or DSUE. My goal in writing this article is to emphasize the importance of filing an estate tax return even when a deceased spouse’s taxable estate is less than the basic exclusion amount, $5.25 million for 2013, in order to benefit a surviving spouse (but only when the surviving spouse’s estate is estimated to be at least $2 million). The examples in this article are based on the presumptions that we are referring to married couples (one of whom has died or will die) who have made no taxable lifetime gifts. The calculations and formulas in the examples would be somewhat more complicated to explain if we also accounted for the taxable lifetime gifts and any gift taxes paid on those gifts while attempting to explain the general concept of the Deceased Spousal Unused Exclusion (DSUE) and its importance.