Lifetime transfer planning will significantly reduce the tax burden that your family has to pay when passing wealth on to future generations.

An individual’s taxable estate is the culmination of all taxable transfers made during their lifetime plus all assets held upon death. Transfers made during lifetime, as opposed to at death, can be at a reduced value thus utilizing less of your lifetime exemption and reducing taxes upon death.

Even though the federal and gift tax rates are each set to 40%, it is possible to transfer more assets, with lower gift and estate tax consequences, when you do so through lifetime transfers, as opposed to transfers upon death.

Another benefit of lifetime transfers is that you can take advantage of the annual gift tax exclusion.  The annual gift tax exclusion will allow you to transfer as much as $30,000 annually per individual. Beginning the process of distributing your wealth to your family over the remaining years of your life to reduce the amount lost to taxes.

By making lifetime gifts of certain property that will appreciate or produce income, you can remove that property from your estate thereby removing the growth on such assets from the taxable estate. We offer the ability to transfer assets to a specialized trust that will allow you to freeze the value of an asset within your estate there by removing growth from the estate while retaining control over the assets.