InterActive Legal

Estate Planning and Elder Law attorneys often advise clients to restructure assets – often putting them in trust.  Whether the goal is to avoid probate, reduce future transfer taxation, or minimize countable resources, transferring assets means changing legal ownership, and any change in ownership could have tax consequences that the planner cannot ignore.  Some transfers might have no tax impact at all, others might have an impact that is insignificant, and others might have substantial tax consequences, which become a larger problem if they are a surprise to the client. Recommending and implementing trust planning without considering all potential tax consequences is a recipe for disaster.

In this webinar, we will focus on spotting the tax issues that matter – or could matter – when trusts are being considered.  We will cover:·       

• What taxes we need to worry about and why
• Tax benefits that clients won’t want to lose (and how not to lose them)
• The basics of trust income taxation
• The relationship between grantor trust status and estate inclusion (and how to trigger either, neither, or both)
• And more.

We will poll the audience on some issues and fact-check a few hypothetical trusts to see what issues we can spot and which issues are easy to miss.  After this presentation, attendees should understand the basics of the taxes that can impact clients who create trusts, how to preserve the best tax results in various situations, and how to trigger grantor trust status and estate inclusion.  Like it or not, we are all tax lawyers at some level, and we need to be familiar with the basics to avoid unexpected surprises.