Estate Tax Protection and Planning

You work your entire life to save and have enough money to comfortably retire—and ideally leave something for your loved ones when you pass away. During your life, you pay all kinds of taxes: income taxes, property taxes, sales taxes, and so on. And at the end, the government even wants to tax you on the assets you have left at your death. 

This is known as the estate tax, sometimes called the inheritance tax or death tax. The best way to protect your assets and your family’s future from excessive taxation is to hire an attorney who specializes in estate tax planning. The experienced estate tax planning lawyers at Legacy Lawyers can help you reduce—if not entirely avoid—the federal estate tax burden.

The estate tax is totally separate from federal income taxes and is paid on the net value of all your assets owned at your death. However, there are fairly sizable exemptions to the estate tax, so it’s primarily high net-worth individuals and their families who are affected.

That said, the estate tax rate is a whopping 40%, so we’re talking about potentially massive sums of money being owed by one’s heirs. And that bill must be paid to the IRS within 9 months of the decedent’s death. 

Notably, the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 nearly doubled the allowable exemptions to the estate tax, ensuring that even fewer families will be affected: 

• Estate tax exemption for individuals grew from $5.4 million to $11.7 million (at 2021 levels).
• Estate tax exemption for married couples grew from $10.9 million to $23.4 million (again, at 2021 levels).

So unless your estate is valued at more than $11.7 million (the rate in 2021), you won’t have to worry about the estate tax at this time. But for those who are affected, there are numerous estate planning strategies available that can greatly reduce the amount owed.  Our estate tax planning lawyers can advise you on the best options for your family.

Families with high-value estates face several complex legal and tax issues—and the estate tax is only one of them. At Legacy Lawyers, we offer a number of advanced estate planning strategies that are primarily aimed at reducing a family’s tax burden. In addition to the estate tax, we also help families navigate the gift tax and generation-skipping tax to pass assets on for successive generations without risk of estate tax decimating the estate at each generation.

Some of our most popular advanced estate planning tools and strategies include:

• Life insurance trusts
• Qualified personal residence trusts
• Grantor retained annuity trusts
• Asset protection trusts
• Land trusts
• Dynasty Trusts 
• Family limited partnerships or limited liability companies
• Asset gifting

You worked hard to build you family’s wealth and legacy, so it makes sense to put similar effort into protecting those assets—and that includes protecting them against excessive taxes. Contact the estate tax planning attorneys at Legacy Lawyers to minimize the potential tax burden faced by your family, so you can maximize the inheritance you pass to them.