Wealth Planning Blog

If you haven’t had the pleasure of administering someone’s trust estate yet, you are likely to either be involved in such an administration someday, or will have someone administering yours for you in the future. Many trusts being administered today, however, were drafted in the 80’s and 90’s and were never updated or revisited once they were put into place. This leaves children and grandchildren struggling to administer trust estates subject to terms that are either outdated or simply don’t make sense anymore for their families.

Over the years, estate and gift taxation has often been a see-saw of policy and tax rate changes. As administrations come and go, it seems so do the tax rates on estates and gifts. From 1 million to 5 million to unlimited millions, the administrations lead our planning to be based on a “best guess” of what’s coming next. Then, last year we finally got a “permanent law” that indexed the rates for inflation but otherwise left them predictable. Or, so some of us thought.