Estate, Trust & Gift Tax Filings
We prepare these returns, and the accounting that supports them, in all 50 states.
Estate Tax Planning
Currently, the estate tax is scheduled to be eliminated in 2010. However, since this tax is such a significant source of revenue for the United States Treasury, most practitioners do not believe that it will be totally removed from the books. Rather, they expect it to survive in some altered form. Therefore, estate planning should still be a cornerstone activity for anyone with significant assets.
There are many estate planning tools that should be considered, including cash and non-cash gifts, an array of trusts and family limited partnerships. Generally, a combination of some of them produces the optimal tax savings. Call for an evaluation of whether you will benefit from estate planning in today’s environment.
Gifts
To the extent that you gift property to others, including your heirs, during your lifetime, it will reduce your estate tax burden. You can gift cash or property, but the rules can get complex and gift tax filings are required in many cases.
Trusts
A trust is a legal entity that owns the property that you transfer to it. They are powerful tools for limited estate taxes, and are often used when an outright gift to a child or loved one is inappropriate or not possible.
Family Limited Partnerships
These are time-proven tools to reduce estate taxes. Typically, parents with significant assets will place some into a partnership and gift interests in that partnership to their children or heirs. Since a minority interest in a partnership is worth something less than outright ownership of the assets, the discount taken on the estate tax return saves you taxes.
Avoiding Probate
Many people advocate structuring your assets in a way that avoids probate, but from a tax perspective this may not be the most effective planning. We'll show you how to limit probate
while maximizing your available tax deductions.
Post Mortem Planning
It is possible, through the use of "disclaimers", to save
significant taxes even if a decedent did not properly structure
his will and assets prior to death. This technique can be
employed in the period between the dates of death and the
due date of the estate tax returns.
