Los Altos, Eugene, etc
Noah took this on March 9, 2008. Timmy seems to have taken a big step up with his skiing the last few weeks. He went up to the summit at Bachelor a couple times last weekend — he calls it “the grown-up hiill” and skied down by himself. He’s skiing a lot of runs now, ending up tired and happy.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bGm_7cVg11Q]
Fenruary 17, 2008
I woke up earlier than Vange or Cristin, much earlier in fact, dressed haphazardly, got onto the computer for a while …
Full of thoughts:
We repeated the Kangaroo run a lot.
So what was special about 1979?
Business International transferred me to Hong Kong, finally, after more than a year of me first dropping hints, then asking.
I spent most of February and March of that year in Hong Kong, testing out a job in Hong Kong with Business International. I stayed in a hotel on the Kowloon side, ran along Hong Kong bay in the early mornings (hot, but not as hot as it was later), then went to the Business International offices in b grade office space on the Hong Kong side. Every day.
They invited me out at night, some. They invited me to sail on their junk (yes, really) to an island in the bay, about 90 minutes each way. I bought a used Honda Civic and agreed to take over the apartment of the guy who was leaving.
I have no pictures, but vivid memories. No, I didn’t go, after all. It’s a long story.
I started at Stanford business school. We moved into a 3-bedroom townhouse at 100C Escondido Village, on campus. I started working with Creative Strategies International. Life was good.We drove our beige Rambler American station wagon from Cuernavaca, where we stayed the last few days in Mexico, to Stanford. It was packed to the gills. We shipped what we could via “air freight.” The picture here is of a stop in San Diego along the way.
The car filled with smoke on the first day, when we were barely driving up the hill from Cuernavaca towards Mexico City. La Manini (we were going to drop her off at her home in Mexico City on the way north) said she smelled something burning and we ignored her. Then the smoke filled the car.
We dropped off la Manini and continued north, with the car backfiring and exploding frequently all the way to Guadalajara, about 8 hours away. We found a hotel and a taller. It turns out that the car had been tuned wrong — in preparation for the trip — by a local mechanic. Nothing serious.
Sabrina had a throat and a temperature a lot of the way. We had to stop for antibiotics in Culiacan.
Mom got stung by a jellyfish in Mazatlan. Excruciating pain. She had to lay in the dark in a room with all the curtains closed, even the sleeping ones, because she couldn’t stand the light.
The temperature in Hermosillo was 45 degrees centigrade. Do the math. We’d waited to stay at the Bahia San Carlos in Hermosillo for years, since it had been way too expensive for us the first times through Guaymas. We couldn’t stay out doors, it was too hot, and the room was dark and hostile.
We crossed an immense desert between Caborca and San Luis without seeing another vehicle, or maybe only two or three, in 100 miles. We had to go west south of the border instead of crossing into Nogales because of visa processing. When we got to San Luis, dark of night, finally out of the desert, we filled with gas and the car wouldn’t start. We hung at a dismal dark restaurant by the highway while the mechanic in the gas station tried to fix it. The place looked so bad that Mom wouldn’t let any of you eat anything except corn flakes and milk/ We waited, wondering what we would do if they couldn’t fix it. They fixed it.
It was near midnight when we got to the Holiday Inn in Mexicali. Hooray, civilization. Try to imagine how we looked at midnight after driving from Hermosillo, having the car go dead, at midnight.
Interesting, somewhat chilling note: in the middle of the desert afternoon, hours away from San Luis, we stopped for everybody to pee. It was weird, there was no shelter, just open desert, so you could see for miles, but there were no other vehicles so privacy didn’t matter. The desert must have been 115 degrees hot. There was no shade. I decided, just for I don’t know exactly what reason, to leave the motor running during the five-minute stop. Just in case. The next time it was turned off, which was in San Luis, it didn’t start. Think about that.
Next day, bone exhausted from Mexico and hungry to cross the border, where things seemed bright and clean and in working order, and cooler, and not covered with a fine grit dust sand, we were turned back. They couldn’t process the residence visa in Mexicali on a Saturday. We had to drive west again, south of the border, through another desert, to Tijuana.
The visa process was hard, demeaning, long lines, abrasive, too many people, including Mom and me and three blonde children. It took hours. There was no preferential treatment for gringo faces and little blond children. They found us all extremely annoying.
Finally we crossed into San Diego. I was enormously relieved to be back on the side of the border in which, if the car broke down, I could get motels, and help from parents, and so forth.
This is a picture of the next day, after a night in the Holiday Inn in San Diego:
The happiness you see on the faces was real. It was a different world. We had grown very tired of Mexico and very happy –despite all the uncertainty — with moving to the United States. We had planned to spend another night in San Diego and see the San Diego zoo, but we couldn’t resist, we drove to Disneyland. We took a motel room in the annex section of the Disneyland Hotel. We had made it. This was such a good time. Anticipation of happiness. And no, it wasn’t like “and then everything bad happened.” In fact, things stayed good for a long time.
What happened to Hong Kong? It turns out that in January of 1979 I spent three weeks with my parents to get a nose job. They had to ream me out because the allergies had caused nasal polyps that meant I never breathed through my nose. This was the second time in my life, the first in 1965 when I was 17.
While I was there, I took advantage to interview for a job with Wells Fargo bank, which was then headquartered in San Francisco. Dennis Nathan, who had been in charge of Wells Fargo in Mexico, had become a friend and recommended me. When I interviewed, they told me I was an unlikely candidate because I didn’t have an MBA degree.
One morning when I was up very early doing pushups in the sunny spot on the living room rug, Dad walked out in his bathrobe, with his coffee cup full, and tossed me the business section of the San Francisco Chronicle. The headline said Stanford MBAs were getting huge salaries. Dad said I should get the MBA, why not, and I said don’t be silly, I have a wife and three kids. He said what the heck, go over there, talk to them, see what they say. Applying doesn’t mean you have to go.
This was one of my dad’s great moments. Advice gently given, no pressure, just a suggestion, no resentment if it wasn’t followed. And in this case, it was followed. I went, I talked, I applied. It wasn’t trivial. I had to take the GRE exams, do essays, get transcripts from Notre Dame and University of Oregon, the whole deal. I completed my application just before I left for Hong Kong.
When I returned from Hong Kong Stanford has sent a telegram. I had been accepted. that year they took one of every 25 applicants. I hadn’t really taken it seriously, but suddenly it was real.
Two months struggling with the decision. Mom said: “Tim, don’t worry, it’s both of us. We’ll take the risk together. If it turns out wrong, we’ll deal with that together. You hate your job now. It’s time to take a risk.” Or something like that. She was always in favor of education. I would never have quit the job and gone back to school without that kind of attitude. This was one of the great moments in our history.
December 7-12, 2007.
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December 12, 2007 The highlight of this visit was Eva Berry’s bright-little blue-eyed sparkling smile, that can brighten up a room. Her nana brought her a frog that sang kids’ songs when she pressed his bellybutton. |
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| She loves the guitar and the kids songs. Every morning when we woke up, Eva would go to the guitar case behind the computer table, and wait for me to play, slapping it and looking back at me. |  |
| On Monday morning we took her to the Winter Garden to hang out, look at toys, eat Miso soup, etc. |  |
| Nana gave Eva a haircut. There was a great deal of discussion about the need for haircuts. Noticed the view of the morning, with the Empire State building in deep background. |  |
| We took a cold walk by the river on Sunday. |  |
| There’s that view again, on a cold Tuesday morning. This is the view from the main window. At night you can see directly to the lights of Times Square, although it’s a few miles away. |  |
Paul and Milena and Eva seem to be very well situated, 37 floors up, in Battery Park, close to work, living in New York but being abloe to escape upwards to the 37th floor, high above the city.
Emily Berry was there for dinner Tuesday night, after an interview with NYU medical school.
I intend to post links to pictures later. We weren’t the most photogenic group on this holiday, to be truthful. The four of us drove over to Bend Wednesday, and the Parsons drove over with Katherine, and Lupe and Luis flew to Redmond and rented a car, to join us. Rodrigo came with us.
The skiing was tough. Bachelor had barely enough snow to open, even with its snowmaking equipment, and I ran over rocks hidden in a thin veneer of snow and fell flat on my face. No damages, just looked dumb, right at the top of the Pine Martens lift. Timmy and Noah skied more than the rest of us, Megan and I got four runs, but our rental skiis were not the easiest and the slopes were dicy. Sabrina skied almost as much as Noah and Timmy, and Luis and Rodrigo skied (well, Luis was on his board, impeccably outfitted, of course).
Meanwhile, back at the lodge, it was sunny and beautiful unless you were Leo, who wasn’t feeling all that great.
We had Thanksgiving dinner at Sunriver Lodge. 
Paul and Milena and Eva went to CanCun, and Laura stayed in Eugene.
Photos will be on Amiglia soon, in parsons.amiglia.com and berrys.amiglia.com.
Not exactly the most treasured memory or great family picture, but maybe useful information in this story on the New York Times. Here you go:
MANY business owners are so consumed with day-to-day operations that they dont think about estate planning. But the federal estate tax, with a top rate of 45 percent, can have a big effect on the business you leave behind, and planning while you are hearty is the best way to manage that.
Among the arrangements to make are leaving a source of cash to cover the tax bill and, as much as you can afford it, giving assets to younger family members while you are alive. These lifetime gifts, as they are called, have a dual benefit: they reduce the size of your taxable estate, and, if the assets increase in value after you have passed them on, the appreciation is tax free.
When Congress was considering a permanent repeal of the tax, which currently applies to estates worth more than $2 million, small-business owners lost interest in this kind of planning, said Dennis I. Belcher, a lawyer with McGuireWoods in Richmond, Va. But since the repeal efforts failed last year, more clients have asked about lifetime gifts, Mr. Belcher said.
Which methods work best depend on your liquidity needs, tolerance for complexity and whether you act before or after the business has increased in value. Here are some considerations:
Reducing business holdings could leave you strapped for cash. The simplest alternative is to buy life insurance that would cover the tax bill, Mr. Belcher said. Start by setting up an irrevocable life insurance trust, which can buy the policy and, when you die, hold the proceeds for whomever you have named as beneficiary. Without a trust, the policy would be considered part of your estate and the proceeds could be taxed.
Next, you need to funnel money into the trust so it can pay the premiums. There is no gift tax on your contributions as long as you stay within the annual limit of $12,000 per recipient, with no limit on the number of recipients. Spouses can pool their gifts to jointly give $24,000 to any person tax free, and each trust beneficiary counts as one person.
You dont want to give up control. First, divide the business into voting and nonvoting shares, even if you must recapitalize the company, said Richard L. Dees, a lawyer with McDermott Will & Emery in Chicago. Ideally, voting stock should make up no more than 10 percent of the total company shares, he said. After that, you can give away partial interests in the business. You can make these gifts to family members directly, but it is better to use an irrevocable trust, which protects the assets from creditors, said Steven B. Gorin, a lawyer with Thompson Coburn in St. Louis.
Since gift recipients lack control, and the shares are considered unmarketable, you can value both the gift and the interest you retain at a discount of 35 to 45 percent, lawyers said. The discount on what you give away enables you to pack more into your annual limit, or into the $1 million overall limit on what you can exclude over a lifetime. (A 45 percent levy kicks in on anything over $1 million.)
Giving away too much in business assets could incur the gift tax. In that case dont give them away sell them in exchange for a promissory note with interest, said John D. Dadakis, a lawyer with Schiff Hardin in New York. With this strategy, you can also apply discounts and avoid tax on future appreciation. Here, too, it is preferable to use a trust, rather than dealing with family members directly.
A liquidity event, like a sale or initial public offering, is on the horizon. You can transfer the appreciation at little or no gift-tax cost with a grantor retained annuity trust. Here you put company shares into a short-term irrevocable trust and retain the right to receive an annual income stream equal to the value of what you contribute plus interest at a rate set each month by the Internal Revenue Service (the Section 7520 rate). If you survive the trust term a condition for this tool to work any appreciation in the trust when the annual payments end passes to your family.
On the other hand, if the appreciation never occurs, the business owner is no worse off, said Charles A. Redd, a lawyer with Sonnenschein Nath & Rosenthal in St. Louis. In this case, the trust would satisfy its payout obligations by returning some of the stock to the owner.
As you near retirement, cash flow can be a concern. Consider a charitable cash bailout, said David T. Leibell, a lawyer with Wiggin and Dana in Stamford, Conn. Here, the owner, who has already transferred some shares to children, puts others into a charitable remainder trust, and the company buys them back for cash at fair market value. The trust uses the cash to supply an income stream to the owner, with the rest going to charity after the owner dies. Meanwhile, the company retires the shares it has bought back, increasing the value of what the children retain. This transaction avoids income tax, gift tax and estate tax, Mr. Leibell said.
Whether you choose just one of these strategies or use them in combination, it is best to start with the least complicated approach that will achieve your goals. Lawyers fees for these transactions can range from less than $10,000 to many multiples of that sum, depending on the details. And any time you give away shares of a business, you must get an appraisal, which can easily cost $5,000 or more. You will want to be sure that what you spend to use various estate-planning tools is less than your heirs would pay the tax man.
A Little Planning Can Mean More for Heirs Later – New York Times
