Estate planners now meeting with clients to review their outdated estate plans commonly come across irrevocable trusts set up by those clients in the 1980s, 90s, or early 2000s. Many of these trusts were established at a time when the estate and gift tax exemption thresholds were much lower and affected a larger group of taxpayers. The point of creating these trusts was to lower the size of a client’s estate in order to avoid as much estate and gift tax as possible. Under the current tax law, these trusts are no longer as necessary and may even be detrimental to an estate plan. In Wisconsin, changes to the Wisconsin Trust Code provide more options for planners and clients to modify or terminate these irrevocable trusts.
See Jacqueline L. Messer, Fixing Outdated Irrevocable Trusts, Milwaukee Business Journal, February 5, 2018.
Special thanks to Jim Hillhouse (Professional Legal Marketing (PLM, Inc.) for bringing this article to my attention.
