The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act makes some exciting alterations to various parts of the tax code. For estate and tax planners, ranking among the most notable changes are the increase to the estate tax exemption thresholds and tax breaks for qualified business income. As might be expected, clever lawyers have started pushing the limits of these new rules to mitigate taxes for themselves and for their clients. A ploy concocted for a client by Steven Oshins, an estate lawyer in Las Vegas, involves taking his client’s $1.6 million in yearly earnings and placing portions into eight separate non-grantor trusts for his 3 children and 8 grandchildren. Since each trust can shield up to 20% of the transferred profits, maxed out at $150,000, this maneuver saves the owner nearly $90,000 in taxes. A delighted Oshins commented on the situation: “Congress can’t contemplate what creative estate planners will come up with.”
See Ashlea Ebeling, Trusts in the Age of Trump: Time to Re-Engineer Your Estate Plan, Forbes, February 13, 2018.
Special thanks to Jim Hillhouse (Professional Legal Marketing (PLM, Inc.) for bringing this article to my attention.
Special thanks to Joel C. Dobris (Professor of Law, UC Davis School of Law) for bringing this article to my attention.
