You can make more money by saving taxes than you can by trying to make more money.
Understand why you should not own your own life insurance and how the voluntary nature of estate taxes and capital gains taxes can be controlled.
Avoid the 12 worst estate planning errors
Learn how the IRS can pay for your life insurance needs
Create a family fund that will be exempt from estate taxes forever
How the wealthiest U.S.families create and preserve their wealth
Reposition growth assets to income assets without income tax penalties
Will Rogers on Death and Taxes
‘The difference between death and taxes is death doesn’t get worse every time Congress meets.’
Will Rogers on a Balanced Budget
‘Alexander Hamilton started the U.S. Treasury with nothing — and that was the closest our country has ever been to being even.’
Defuse Your Ticking Tax Time Bomb
Legitimate planning tools allow wealthy individuals to pack more assets into gifts and transfers to heirs. Understand how these tools are used to maintain control, while passing down the future tax liabilities. Use your pension, IRA and qualified retirement funds more efficiently, and avoid capital punishment at death by avoiding taxes that reduce your savings by 80%. See how traps force families to sell ongoing businesses and income producing properties in a garage sale environment; recognize that control is better than ownership.
Could your estate withstand a 5,500 point drop in the Dow? It’s going to happen at death. Instead, create a perpetual private family bank to fund activities forever sheltered from estate taxes.
Financial and Planning Links
Bookmark here for constantly updated sites and free articles!
FOR YOUR OWN CRT SCENARIO or try your own at Donor Direct. Please note — there’s much more to estate and charitable planning than simply running software calculations, but it does give you a chance to see how the calculations affect some of the design considerations. This is not “do it yourself brain surgery”. Is a CRUT superior to a CRAT? Which type of CRUT is best used with which assets? Although it may be counter-intuitive, sometimes a lower payout CRUT makes more sense and pays more total income to beneficiaries. Why? When to use a CLUT vs. CLAT and the traps in each lead trust. Which tools work best in which planning scenarios? Check with our office for solutions to this alphabet soup of planned giving tools.
‘Over and over again, the courts have said there is nothing sinister in so arranging one’s affairs as to keep taxes as low as possible. Everybody does so, rich and poor, and all do right, for nobody owes any duty to pay more tax than the law demands. Taxes are enforced exactions, not voluntary contributions.’
Judge Learned Hand
New Estate Tax Schedule
Your Planning Just Got Harder
Economic Growth and Tax Relief Reconciliation Act of 2001
“The Government Keeps Moving the Goal Posts”
Gift Tax Exemption goes to $1,000,000, but no longer linked or “unified” with estate tax
Estate and Generation Skipping Tax (GST) rates and scheduled implementation linked
No step up in basis for all inherited assets, new and complicated rules will come into place. Within the unlimited marital deduction, any step-up is soon to be limited to $3,000,000 passing from decedent to spouse.
Allows a new basis for $1,300,000 of property inherited from the decedent, but no step-down or step up beyond the $1.3 million. NY Times Article June 14 Lawyers and Accountants Expect Windfall From Estate Tax Repeal
State death tax credit will be reduced by 25% in 2002, 50% in 2003, 75% in 2004, repealed in 2005, and replaced instead with a deduction for state death taxes paid
The gift tax is not repealed and is no longer linked to the estate tax. The gift tax exclusion amount will remain at $1,000,000 from 2002 onward.
CONTACT US FOR A FREE PRELIMINARY CASE STUDY
Vaughn W. Henry
E-mail:[email protected]