Multi-Trust Provisions
Where appropriate, we help clients create trusts that divide into “A” and “B” trusts when one spouse dies, as a strategy to avoid wasting that spouse´s ability to leave a certain amount of property free of estate taxes.
Total Return Trusts
Often the traditional trust which provides income to a person for life, with principal restricted, can create adverse investment incentives. The modern total return trust approach can put the income beneficiary and the remainder beneficiary on the same page when it comes to seeking optimal investment strategies from the trustee and providing the ideal safety net for the “income” beneficiary.
Family Limited Partnerships
Are often used for family wealth planning and taking advantage of valuation discounts.
Life Insurance Trusts
A common and simple way to reduce estate taxes and protect a surviving spouse.
Generation-Skipping Trusts
Are an increasingly common technique to (a) reduce estate taxes when your children die and (b) reduce the likelihood that an unanticipated divorce or bankruptcy of a child would result in dissipation of the child´s inheritance from you.
Lifetime Gifts
This and other long range planning can be used to dramatically reduce exposure to estate tax by maximizing the otherwise wasted annual exclusions from gift taxes (allowing wealth to transfer tax free). One tool we recently created in The Family Vision Experience’s unique process is The Below the Line Trust.