Viva Vebas
Never heard of a benefit plan called the Voluntary
Employees' Beneficiary Association (VEBA) trust? You will
eventually. "There are a lot of people out there promoting
them to affluent small-business owners," says Byron Moore,
president of Argent Advisors, a financial planning firm in Ruston,
Louisiana.
A VEBA is a welfare benefit trust that allows you to set aside
tax-deductible money for employee health, disability or life
insurance. "VEBAs are nothing more than a funding vehicle for
certain types of benefits," says Diane Fuchs, a tax attorney
with the Washington, DC, office of Womble Carlyle Sandridge &
Rice PLLC. Regular contributions by employers and/or employees can
be made to a certain level tax-free, and the business can take an
immediate deduction for the entire premium.
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Sounds good, but buyer beware: The IRS penalizes business owners
using VEBAs as deferred or supplemental pension plans. You can
incur significant tax penalties if you're not careful. VEBAs
aren't cheap, either. Setup could cost more than $10,000, and
the minimum initial contribution runs $100,000, Moore says.
Also ponder the rate of return 20 years down the line and
whether you can sustain the plan. Says David Silverman, New York
City tax advisor and co-author of the latest edition of Taxes for Dummies (Hungry Minds), "If
you suspend the payments to the VEBA and have to surrender the
policy, you can take a monumental hit."
-Chris Pentilla.
Stayin' Alive
Some expected Silicon Valley's signature bank to crash along
with the dotcoms it finances. But Silicon Valley Bank CEO Kenneth
Wilcox says low exposure has kept them safe-and growth is in the
offing.
38%
of U.S. executives predict the economy will
slow further before
SOURCE: Management
Association
|
Early-stage, venture-backed tech and life sciences companies
make up about 70 to 80 percent of your portfolio. How are you
faring in the dotcom meltdown?
Kenneth Wilcox: Our
investing model is based on the idea that if a company has
intellectual property, you've got a backstop, and there's a
very good source of repayment there. We've financed a number of
infrastructure and backbone companies, which tend to have
intellectual property, but the e-commerce companies don't
usually, so we've tried to stay away from them for the most
part.
How about defaults?
Wilcox: No, we haven't
seen an increase in the number of payment defaults, but we have
seen a marked increase in the number of companies that are not
meeting their projections. In the end, we're still getting
paid, but companies are having a lot harder time meeting their
projections.
What changes have you made to deal with the tech-sector
failures?
Wilcox: We watch things much
more closely now. Instead of looking at a company every six or
eight weeks, we may look at its progress every three or four weeks.
But our modus operandi has always been that we support companies
that are supported by investors. In that way, we haven't
changed at all.
How bad will this get?
Wilcox: Some venture
capitalists [are looking at this quarter or the next] as the time
when they will have taken care of all the stray cats and dogs in
their portfolios and be more able to go after new
opportunities.
-C.J.Prince.
Chris Pentilla is a freelance journalist in Carrboro, North
Carolina. Her Web site is www.sitting-duck.com.
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