LAW OFFICE OF
BRENDAN P. KEARSE
44 Wall Street, 12th Floor
New York, New York 10005
Telephone: (212) 425-6244
Fax: (212)
425-6245
Email: bk@kearselaw.com
MAIN TOPICS
Welcome and
subtopics (including Lost Wills)
Common
Estate Planning Techniques (including House Trusts
a/k/a QPRTs)
Welcome
Welcome! This is the website for the Law Office of Brendan P. Kearse, an attorney located in New York, New York. His practice concentrates on:
· Estate
Planning, Wills and Trusts;
·
Probate and Estate Administration;
·
Lost Wills, and
Dying Without a Will;
· Guardianship Proceedings and Alternatives Thereto;
· Estate and
Trust Litigation; and
Each of these topics is covered in more depth under the heading “Legal Services” on this website.
This website also contains a general discussion of some “Common Estate Planning Techniques”.
This website has been updated to
reflect the extensive changes enacted by Congress in mid-2001, many of which
began to take effect on January 1, 2002.
It will shortly be updated to reflect the new provisions to take effect
on January 1, 2004.
Please do not hesitate to send an
email if you have any general questions: bk@kearselaw.com. Mr. Kearse will be pleased to respond
personally, (although please understand that he cannot and does not give legal
advice to persons unless he interviews them thoroughly and signs a formal
Engagement Letter with them). Please
enjoy this website!
Biographical Information
1. BRENDAN P.
KEARSE, ESQ. is the principal attorney of the firm. He is a graduate of Columbia University School of Law and of
Williams College. Before starting his
private law practice, he spent several years practicing at some of the largest
firms in the City of New York. His
legal career was preceded by one year of volunteer work at Covenant House (a
shelter for runaway youth) and a period of study at Oxford University. Click to Email: bk@kearselaw.com
He has served as a Member of the Committee on Estate and Gift Taxation of the Bar Association of the City of New York. His published work has been cited approvingly by the highest court of the State of New York. He is admitted to practice in the State of New York and is court-certified to serve as a guardian, guardian ad litem and court evaluator.
Mr. Kearse serves on the Board of the New York City non-profit “Elders Share The Arts,” an organization devoted to integrating the youth and seniors of New York City through projects that explore the history of the city and its residents, and to validating the worth of the city’s seniors, their creative expression, and their importance to the continuing vitality of the city’s vibrant communities.
2. BENJAMIN H. MELLORS, ESQ. is admitted to practice in New York, New Jersey and Wisconsin. He is experienced in and focuses on matters of Will and Trust preparation, estate administration, trust administration, estate and gift taxation, and litigation including will contests and contested estate and trust accountings. He is a graduate Brandeis University and of the University of Wisconsin Law School where his distinguished achievement earned him membership in the Order of the Coif.
Click to Email: bhm@kearselaw.com
Legal Services
Estate Planning, Wills
and Trusts. Mr. Kearse helps
clients to write their Wills, to create trusts, and to do estate planning
generally. He advises on how to
minimize the estate and gift taxes that might otherwise be owed, while
designing an estate plan that is sensitive to the needs and dynamics of your
family. (See Common Estate Planning Techniques, discussed
below). The best possible tax plan is
not always the best estate plan, especially if it ignores (or creates!)
tensions in your family. Fortunately, a
good attorney can suggest a variety of tax-efficient compromises that will suit
individual family circumstances.
Probate and Estate
Administration. After someone dies,
the surviving family members usually need to hire a lawyer. The lawyer goes to court to have the last
Will declared valid (called “probating the Will”) or to inform the court that
there was no Will. The court will
formally appoint someone (the person named in the Will or a family member) to
wind up the deceased person’s affairs and to distribute his or her assets. The lawyer also advises the person so
appointed (called an Executor if there was a Will or an Administrator if there
was not) in the fulfillment of his or her duties. Additionally, the attorney can prepare certain tax returns and
represent the estate before the IRS if the estate is audited (as certain types
of estates usually are). Except for
very small or very simple estates, retaining an attorney is probably a very
good idea.
Lost
Wills, and Dying Without A Will.
What happens if a relative dies and you cannot find his or her
Will? First of all, you should search
thoroughly for any Will. For example,
try calling the lawyer who handled the sale of a house recently, maybe the
lawyer also prepared a Will and is holding it in his or her vault. Also, trying calling the banks where your
relative had accounts and ask whether he or she also had a safe deposit
box. Sometimes people put their Wills
in a safe deposit box (although they probably should not, because it makes
finding and probating the Will much harder).
If you have an exact photocopy of a Will, but not the original Will, it
may be possible to probate the photocopy, although this is not the Surrogate’s Court’s
first choice and they might resist allowing this.
Whether you cannot find the Will or there simply is no Will,
the result is the same. New York law
will dictate who gets property under the “intestacy rules”. Intestacy, or dying intestate, just means
dying without a testament or Will. In
essence, these rules say that if you die married with no children, your spouse
gets your property. If you die married
with children, the spouse will get the first $50,000 plus one-half of what
remains but the children will share the other half, even if they are
infants. This is an excellent reason to
have a Will, by the way, if you have children:
do you really want your fourteen-year-old to have as much money as her
widowed Mom? Imagine what the teenage
years will be like! Do you want a
court-appointed guardian to hold your children’s money until age twenty-one,
taking a fee each year, perhaps unsympathetic to your widow’s request for
clothing or school money? It
happens. If you die with no spouse and
no children, then your parents get your property, or, if you have no living
parent, your brothers and sisters get the property, with any deceased brother
or sister also getting an equal share set apart that his or her children will
share.
How does this process of distributing the assets (and paying
the bills and taxes) happen when there is no Will? The process is almost identical to the probate process. You generally hire a lawyer to go to the
Surrogate’s Court and file a Petition just as you would if there had been a
Will, except that your Petition will state that there was no Will. The Court will insist that the property be
divided up according to the intestacy rules, and it will watch over the estate
more closely than if there had been a Will, requiring that the administrator
put up a bond and get Court permission before selling any real estate, for
example.
What if no one does anything and you think you should be
getting part of the deceased relative’s estate? You should take the initiative and hire a lawyer! If no one in the family does anything for
more than two or three months, at most, then something is wrong. Somebody will wind up controlling the
property, rightly or wrongly, and then the fighting starts. To avoid it, just step forward and start the
Court-supervised intestacy process yourself.
The Court process ensures that everyone gets formal notice of what is
happening and that no one gets cheated, accidentally or intentionally. The lawyer you hire will probably be paid
from the assets of the deceased relative anyway, so if you were only going to
get one-fourth of those assets, you’ll essentially only be paying one-fourth of
the lawyer’s fee. This is not the time
to indulge your fear of lawyers or the court system; you will regret it later.
At the risk of belaboring this point, I will give some
examples: Whether there was a Will or not, you probably need to hire or at
least consult with a lawyer within two or three months of your family member’s
death. Harsh experience shows that
frequently when there is no Will relatives behave as if jewelry, furniture and
real estate is just up for grabs. They
ignore the intestacy rules. Brothers of
the deceased may just take over their deceased brother’s store or apartment
building, at first just intending to run it to preserve it as a business, but
later coming to think of it as “theirs”.
Later the deceased’s twenty-something children realize they have
essentially been robbed of their inheritance.
Just because someone died without a Will does not mean that the family
can just make their own private arrangements.
Especially with real estate, you will discover (possibly not until many
years later when you go to sell the property or when the next relative dies)
that the money that was saved by not hiring a lawyer in a timely manner is lost
ten-fold when a lawyer has to be brought in a decade later to clear up a very
mixed up deed or to sue an aunt on behalf of someone who was fifteen when his
mother died. Delay never fixes or
resolves an estate: it just drives up
the costs and results in family quarrels so bitter that people frequently do
not speak for years. If someone has
died, with or without a Will, you should consult with and probably hire an
experienced lawyer to handle the estate.
Get that ball rolling…
Will Contests.
Sometimes people disagree about something as basic as whether a deceased
person had a Will, whether they had one but revoked it or signed a new Will
later, whether they signed the Will at a time they lacked capacity (due to
illness, senility, etc.), or whether the true last Will or gifts contained in
it were obtained by someone’s “undue influence” (i.e., improper pressure). A Will contest usually starts where somebody
has a hunch that something smells fishy.
For example: “Ray never told me he was leaving his nurse $25,000” or
“Why would my brother have cut me out of the Will and left everything to our
cousin? We weren’t fighting.” (A related proceeding often starts because
someone thinks: “Hey, Ray had a Will.
How come no one’s going to court to get it probated?”) Thus, the first step is always somebody
trusting his or her instincts, gathering some information and calling a lawyer.
What will the lawyer do?
First, he will examine the Will if you have a copy. Second, he will appear on your behalf when
the Will is being offered for probate, effectively telling the judge that this
Will might be defective even though it was signed in front of witnesses or may
otherwise appear correct. The judge
will permit the lawyer to examine the witnesses in sworn depositions, asking
questions like: “Did the person who made the Will appear to be frightened or
bullied into signing the Will? Who was
there? Did he seem like he was in
command of his faculties that morning?
Did he appear to be on medications?
Did he remember who his family members were and what he owned? Did he know he was signing a Will?” Additionally, the lawyer may go on to file
formal objections to the probate of the Will and begin subpoenaing the
testimony of other persons who knew the decedent or who may be at the root of
the problem. Sometimes this clarifies
that there is no problem, sometimes it reveals real misdeeds.
On the other hand, you may be the named Executor in the Will
and you are trying to get the Will probated (accepted by the court as valid)
but someone is fighting it. In such a
situation, your lawyer Will help you respond to the questions of the objectant
to the Will and his lawyer while trying to prove that their concerns are
mistaken or unfounded. Unfortunately,
Will contests are sometimes filed by people who are simply upset that they
didn’t “get anything” under the Will.
It bears repeating therefore, that only spouses are entitled to receive
a certain amount from someone else’s Will (called the spouse’s “elective
share”) and that children, parents and everyone else can legitimately be cut
out entirely. If there was no Will,
however, New York law will dictate who gets property. Many people are surprised to learn, for example, that if a
husband or wife dies without a Will and with a spouse and children, New York
law states that the spouse will get the first $50,000 plus one-half of what
remains but that the children will share the other half, even if they
are infants. If you want to cut one of
your children out of your Will, therefore, consult an attorney, because that
child will have a real incentive to contest your Will: if he can get it rejected for probated, he
will get part of the children’s half.
Planning for Incapacity. Our life expectancies are increasing and
advances in medical technology can keep us alive longer. Unfortunately, this combination can lead to
long periods of partial or total incapacity.
Many clients are concerned about their health and the effect that their
current or future illness may have on the control and uses of their
assets. In this context, an attorney
may prepare Revocable Living Trusts (in which the client names a trustee to
manage the client’s affairs for the period of the client’s incapacity and in
which the client lays down the rules for how the property may and may not be
used) and Durable Powers of Attorney (a simpler document in which the client
may simply give a very trusted person, such as a spouse, the power to make
binding financial decisions for the client).
There are several other arrangements, with differing benefits, that can
address a client’s concerns about managing their property during illness.
Clients may also wish to prepare documents such as a Health
Care Proxy (in which they name someone to make routine health care decisions
for them only in the event they are not in a position to make those decisions
themselves) and Living Will (in which they write to their medical care
providers instructing them as to what end-of-life medical treatments they wish
to receive or to decline, should they be unable to express those wishes when
the time arises).
Guardianship Proceedings and
Alternatives Thereto. Sometimes a
loved one has assets that he or she cannot adequately manage without assistance
(because of advanced age, or because of an accident). The incapacity may be minor or great, and may be temporary,
permanent or degenerative. There are
various legal arrangements that can assist such a person. It may be as simple as getting a trusted son
or daughter to manage a checking account, or establishing in such a trusted
relative a power to make limited financial decisions. In some cases, the functional limitations imposed by the affected
person’s incapacity may force relatives to consider having a guardian appointed
(usually a family member) to protect the incapacitated relative from the
unscrupulous and to arrange for his or her financial and personal care, even so
far as to arrange Medicaid payment for a nursing home and the planning that
sometimes needs to be done to make that possible.
In all such situations, good legal advice is critical to
choosing the legal intervention that is least disruptive to the affected
person, and to respecting the areas in which such person does have
capacity to order his or her own affairs.
Such situations also demand that the attorney consulted show a genuine
concern for the family involved, because otherwise family quarrels can be
created (as frequently happens, for example, where joint accounts with right of
survivorship are involved).
Estate and Trust
Litigation. Sometimes people feel
they are not being treated fairly by the trustee of a trust or the executor of
an estate. Sometimes they believe that
a trust or loved one’s estate is being mishandled. And sometimes they are simply unsure about their rights and legal
options (or their obligations if they are an executor or trustee, etc.) and
they need confidential advice. Mr.
Kearse can provide that advice, and can help negotiate solutions before they
become litigation. He can also provide
representation in defending against such lawsuits or in prosecuting them,
should it come to that. A note to the
cautious: the most common source of
these disputes is a confusing Will or trust agreement, or, frequently, an
estate plan that was never updated when circumstances changed. It is therefore a good idea to review your
estate plan when your family changes (births and deaths), your assets change
(your wealth increases or decreases, you come into an inheritance, your
retirement looms) or the law changes (note that there was a major revision to
the estate tax law in 2001).
Asset Protection Planning. Increasingly, people who have worked hard to build their assets live in fear that an unexpected lawsuit, business failure or other event could undo a lifetime of work. Proper asset protection limits one’s exposure to such events. It is as legitimate as doing business through a corporation (which, after all, is supposed to limit an investor’s losses to the amount invested). What doesn’t it do? It does not reduce one’s income taxes in any way. It does not involve techniques that depend for their success on secrecy or hiding assets. And it does not work to thwart existing creditors or plaintiffs. However, whether through the use of “on-shore” techniques (such as limited partnerships, discussed below) or off-shore techniques (such as trusts created in countries that do not have automatic recognition of U.S. judgments) asset protection planning is a legal means of safeguarding your assets from unforeseen, financially catastrophic litigation.
At its most basic, asset protection planning might look like
this: We review your assets and I might
notice that you both own a home and some rental real estate. What if a tenant slips on the stairs? He could sue you and seek not just the value
of the rental property in the lawsuit, but the value of your home and bank
accounts and car and other property, even though those other assets have
nothing to do with how the tenant got hurt.
For this reason, one recommendation might simply be that your rental
real estate be isolated from your other assets by being owned in a separate
corporation, LLC, or partnership. That
way, liability for what happened at that rental property can probably be
limited to, at worst, loss of the property itself. Asset protection planning is frequently this simple and logical.
A few words of caution and some tips: There are many companies offering asset
protection advice of very low quality.
Also, please be aware that courts frequently look right through asset
protection structures where the structures were adopted late in a lawsuit or
collection problem. This is especially
true where the court perceives that the debtor’s or defendant’s [i.e., your]
sole intention was to defeat a legitimate creditor or plaintiff. Whether you use the services of this law
firm or another, I would respectfully suggest that you do asset protection
planning (1) with an attorney (because your conversations with your attorney
are by law confidential and attorney-client privileged) who has skills in
addition to asset protection planning, not with a company devoted exclusively
to asset protection, (2) well in advance of a problem, and (3) as an integrated
part of your normal estate planning or business planning, implemented over
time. “Asset protection” is a lawful,
moral and accepted part of routine business and estate planning.
Common Estate Planning Techniques
In addition to having an
up-to-date Will that ensures that your property will pass to favored
individuals, and that names a guardian for your minor children, you may be
concerned about whether your assets will be consumed by the estate tax. If the assets (including retirement accounts
and the face value of insurance policies) of you and/or your spouse may exceed
$1,000,000 by the time of your death, you are right to be concerned. Here are
some common techniques for reducing the tax that may be imposed upon your
estate (please see the important legal disclaimer at the end of this segment):
1.
A Credit Shelter Trust In Your Will: As of January 1, 2002, every U.S. citizen or resident alien was
permitted to own up to $1,000,000 at his or her death, without imposition of
any NY or federal estate tax. This is
called the “applicable exemption amount” or the “unified credit”. As of January 1, 2004, however, it increased
for federal purposes (not for NY purposes) to $1,500,000; on January 1, 2006 it
increased to $2,000,000; and is scheduled to reach $3,500,000 on January 1,
2009 (assuming no further changes in the law), to be repealed along with
the entirety of the estate on January 1, 2010, and then to come roaring back at
just $1,000,000 on January 1, 2011. Other
than for the 365 in 2010 when the estate tax may be repealed, the estate tax is
imposed at rates between 39% and 45% on every dollar above that tax exempt
amount. If you simply leave all your
property to your spouse, you will use only one of the two unified credits
available to you and your spouse, resulting in a needless additional estate tax. To avoid this problem, you need to leave the
amount of your unified credit to someone other than your spouse, such as your
children. Most people do not want to do
that since, in smaller estates, that may make their children wealthier than
their surviving spouse, or may simply upset the normal family dynamic. The solution? Consider leaving the amount of your unified credit in trust
(called a ”Credit Shelter Trust” or sometimes called a “Bypass Trust”) for your
spouse (and possibly your children as well) with instructions to favor your
spouse and to give him or her easy access to the trust property as needed or
requested. That way, as of 2006,
between you and your spouse, you can shelter $4,000,0000 (2 x $2,000,000 per
spouse) and your surviving spouse can still have the security of ready access
to the funds.
2.
$12,000 Annual Gift Tax Exclusion: The Internal Revenue Code
allows gifts of this amount to be made without the imposition of estate or gift
taxes. You can make gifts of $12,000
per year ($24,000 per year if you are married) per recipient. For example: if you are single and have
three children, you can give gifts to those children of up to $36,000 per year
without negative tax consequences; if all three children are married you can
give them $72,000 ($12,000 to each child and $12,000 to each child’s spouse);
and if both you and your three children are all married you could give them a
total of $144,000 per year ($24,000 to each child and $24,000 to each child’s
spouse). You don’t have to stop with
your children either, you can make these gifts to your grandchildren, nieces,
uncles, even people who are not related to you. Over time, these gifts add up and can reduce your estate --- and
your estate’s tax bite --- substantially.
These gifts can also be used to fund trusts for persons to whom you
might not wish to give cash outright.
(FYI: the people who receive these gifts are not required to report them
as income for income tax purposes.)
(Note: This $12,000 annual gift tax exclusion amount is adjusted each
year for inflation, so it occasionally increases, always in units of $1,000.)
3.
Children's or Grandchildren's Irrevocable
Trust: These are
trusts used by parents and grandparents to accumulate assets for a child's or
grandchild's education or health, usually.
These can be created for individual children/grandchildren or can be
created for a class of all your children/grandchildren. These trusts are frequently funded with $12,000
annual gifts, discussed in point two above.
4.
Direct Payments of Medical and Educational
Expenses: In addition to the $12,000 Annual Gift Tax
Exclusion gifts discussed above, you can pay unlimited amounts for someone
else’s medical costs or educational expenses, as long as you pay those costs
directly to the institution that provided the service. For example, you could pay your grandson’s
$45,000 annual tuition to State University and pay his $65,000 worth of
uninsured medical bills from an accident this year, and still make the
additional $12,000 annual gift to him during the holidays (or to a trust or
Uniform Gift to Minor’s Account, etc.)
Just be sure that you don’t give the tuition money or medical expense
money to your grandson or his parents to put toward those expenses; instead get
the actual bills and make your checks payable directly to the State University
and the hospital.
5.
Irrevocable Life Insurance Trust: This is a trust used to prevent
estate taxes on insurance proceeds. You
would create a trust agreement and fund the trust with your insurance
policy. You give up control of the policy
to the trustees that you have chosen (a close friend of yours and your spouse,
perhaps), but you also effectively remove that insurance policy from your
taxable estate. This way, when you die,
the value of your life insurance is not hit with estate tax --- since a trust,
not you, owns the policy, the policy pay-out is fully sheltered from the 39% to
45% federal estate tax. This is a
reasonably simply and extremely effective technique.
6.
Family Limited Partnership: This is a limited partnership
in which only family members hold interests.
Usually a parent will create the partnership to hold a family
business. The parent will own all of
the general partnership shares (thereby ensuring that he or she retains control
of the business) but gives away much of the limited partnership interests to
his or her children or grandchildren as gifts.
The gifts of the limited partnership interest face lower gift taxes than
the same business interests held outside the FLP otherwise might, because of
the lack of marketability of the limited partnership interests and the discount
for lack of control. On the parent’s
death, the shares he or she still owns may also enjoy a substantially reduced
estate tax valuation for the same reasons.
Family Limited Partnerships can achieve many goals, both
for estate planning and asset protection.
They: 1) provide asset
protection for partnership property from the creditors of a partner (such as
someone who sues the family business and obtains a judgment against it), 2)
provide protection for limited partners from their own future creditors, 3)
enable gifts to be made to children at discounted gift tax values while
maintaining management control of the family business in an older generation,
and 4) reduce the estate tax value of property when the older generation
dies. For these reasons FLPs, as they
are sometimes called, have been steadily increasing in popularity for the last
decade.
7.
Charitable Remainder Trust: This is a trust whereby a donor
will transfer property to a charitable trust and retain an income stream from
the property transferred. The donor gets to live off the property for the
duration of his life, and at his death the charity receives the remaining
property. The donor receives a
charitable contribution income tax deduction upon creating the trust, and
avoids a capital gains tax on the transferred property. This is an excellent option for people who
are charitably inclined, and who own highly appreciated assets that they will
need to rely upon.
Example: Mr. Morris is 75. Most of his net worth is in General Electric
stock that he bought fifteen years ago.
He needs to live off the income and he is worried that if he doesn’t
sell the stock and diversify his holdings, a market decline may leave him
vulnerable. On the other hand, he also
worries that if he does sell the stock so that he can buy a mix of varied
stocks and bonds, he will immediately lose 15% of his holdings to the capital
gains tax. A solution: Mr. Morris can
give the General Electric stock to a charitable trust. The charitable trust can sell the General
Electric stock and, because the trust is a charitable entity, will not owe
capital gains taxes on the sale. The
charitable trust will then invest the entire proceeds of the sale in a balanced
mix of stocks and bonds, paying 5% of the trust fund to Mr. Smith
annually. At Mr. Smith’s death the
trust will terminate and the charity will receive whatever property is left.
8.
Fractional Interest Gift: Making a gift of only a part of one’s interest in a piece
of property (usually real estate) allows the donor to obtain fractional
interest discounts for estate and gift tax purposes. For example, if at your death you owned 67% of a $1 million piece
of real estate, the IRS recognizes that it is worth much less than
$670,000 because who would want to buy your two-thirds of a piece of real
estate and then be stuck dealing with the other one-third owner? Thus, your estate will not owe estate taxes
on $670,000, but on some lesser amount.
Another form of a fractional interest gift is a House Trust (see number
10 below), sometime called a QPRT or Qualified Personal Residence Trust. This
technique may permit one to effectively transfer one’s home to children at a
significantly reduced estate/gift tax value, while retaining to oneself the
right to continue to live in the home for a fixed number of years. The Tax Code specifically approves of this
QPRT technique.
9. Private Foundation: This is a charitable entity often used by higher net-worth families. Private foundations can be used to train younger generations in family traditions of responsible charity, and can provide those family members with a reasonable salary (if that is desirable), while entitling the parents’ transfers to the private foundation to qualify for substantial estate and income tax deductions.
10.
House
Trust: The House Trust
(or as the IRS prefers to call it, the “Qualified Personal Residence Trust” or
“QPRT”) is simply the technique of transferring the ownership of your house from
your own name into the name of a trust.
You retain the right to live in the home for a specified period of years
(the trust “term”). At the end of that
specified period, the children (or other beneficiaries designated in the trust
agreement) become the owners of the residence.
Thereafter, the residence will no longer be a part of your taxable
estate.
The House Trust technique is
expressly permitted by the IRS and the tax code, and it has a big tax
advantage. When you put your home in
the trust, you have made a gift to your children. However, the gift is not the full value of the house on the date
of the gift. Instead, the gift is only
the value of the children’s right to take possession of the residence at the
end of the specified period of years and only if you outlive that period ---
the children’s interest is worth a lot less than the right to own the house and
sell it tomorrow, and the tax law recognizes that fact. The longer a period you choose before you
will vacate the house and let your children have it (or start paying them
rent), the lower the gift tax value of the transfer to your children. The decision you will have to make is “What
is the longest term of this trust I can choose where I am still reasonably sure
I will outlive my right to continue living in the house?” For example, a $1,000,000 home can be gifted
to a house trust, removing $1,000,000 from the donor’s taxable estate, but the
taxable gift may be as little as 10 or 20 percent of the value of the residence
if you are 60 years old and chose a trust term of 20 years. By keeping the gift tax value of the QPRT
transfer below your $1,000,000 exemption from federal gift tax, you can avoid
laying out cash to pay the federal gift tax on the gift --- it will just use up
a part of your exemption. By the way,
if you want to continue to live in your house even after the trust term, you
will have to work out a rental arrangement with your children --- but that’s
another good way to transfer assets to them without owing gift tax!
IMPORTANT LEGAL DISCLAIMER: Nothing on this website constitutes legal advice or an offer of legal advice. Unless you have signed an Engagement Letter with Brendan P. Kearse he has undertaken no responsibility for your legal problems or planning, nor does he owe any duty to you. All techniques and ideas discussed on this website are general in nature and are incomplete descriptions of the law and should not be relied upon by you. Consult your attorney.
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