Preservation | Family Wealth Protection & Planning

Debt ceiling issues have taken center stage recently, but advisors should also keep an eye on proposed tax increases in the Biden administration's fiscal year 2024 budget. High-income individuals and large corporations may be affected by these adjustments, as discussed in an article written by Greensfelder Officer Keith Grissom for Rethinking65.

Many reconnect with their family during their vacations. Your family may own a home on the beach, in the mountains, or in the country where multiple generations gather each year. The home may have been in your family for generations, or it may be newly purchased. Regardless, the family vacation home is a unique asset that symbolizes important memories and family connections. For this reason, you should specifically address the vacation home in your estate plan to avoid hard feelings and even disputes.

It’s that time of year again!  The start of 2022 has brought us an increase in exemption amounts for estate, gift, and generation-skipping transfer (GST) taxes. Each year, the Internal Revenue Service adjusts tax rates to provide for annual cost-of-living increases.

The latest text of the proposed reconciliation bill, titled the Build Back Better Act, published on October 28, 2021, is void of many of the prior proposed tax changes that would have upended estate planning. Changes that were included in the earlier version of the bill but not in this most recent version include:

Wolters Kluwer has released projected 2022 figures for the gift tax annual exclusion amount as well as the estate and gift tax lifetime exemption amount. These figures were determined by Wolters Kluwer using formulas contained in the Internal Revenue Code. They are based on the increase in the Chained Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers (C-CPI-U) for the 12-month period that ended August 31, 2021.

On September 28, 2021, the House Budget Committee released a report that provides explanations with respect to certain provisions included in the proposed House bill called the Build Back Better Act (the “Report”).

On Monday, September 13, 2021, the House Ways and Means Committee released the text for proposed tax changes to be incorporated in a budget reconciliation bill called the Build Back Better Act (the “Act”). The 881-page text includes several significant changes to income and transfer taxes that could drastically change estate, gift and individual income tax planning if made into law.

Now that the new year has arrived, it is a good time to catch up on the latest tax rates for estate and trust income tax brackets and exemption amounts for estate, gift and generation-skipping transfer (GST) taxes in 2021. The Internal Revenue Service adjusts these figures annually for cost-of-living increases.

In 2020, the estate/gift and generation-skipping (GST) transfer tax exemptions are each $11.58 million per person, and the tax rate for each is 40 percent. These exemptions will be reduced to $5 million (indexed for inflation) on Jan. 1, 2026, assuming Congress does not change the exemptions sooner.

How many times have you prepared your income tax returns for the previous year, only wishing you knew then what you know now, so you could go back and make more advantageous tax decisions? In most cases, you are stuck with the decisions you made before the new tax year began, even though you may not have all the relevant tax information available to assist with those decisions until several months into the new tax year. Too bad for you, says the IRS, unless you are an estate or trust.