Special Needs, General Estate, and Business Succession Planning
Building a successful business requires a sacrifice of your time, energy and money. What will happen to your business if you become incapacitated, die, or simply no longer want to continue running it?
Is it your desire to create a multi-generational family business? Or would you like to someday sell your business and pass the proceeds on to your family?
During our Life and Legacy Planning Sessions for Business Owners, we explore with your personal and business values, desires, and plans for the future of your business. We help you create a business succession plan or business exit plan to ensure future generations benefit from your hard work.
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 Boylhart Law, 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. There are both state estate taxes and federal estate taxes. In Texas, there is no state estate tax. As for federal estate tax, 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, President Trump’s 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 expanded from $5.4 million to $11.2 million.
Estate tax exemption for married couples expanded from $10.9 million to $22.4 million.
So unless your estate is valued at more than $11.2 million, 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 Terra Bella Law Group, 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 the 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 your 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 us to minimize the potential tax burden faced by your family, so you can maximize the inheritance you pass to them.
