Client Objective:

To use Elizabeth as their financial liaison, alleviating this burden from the client.

Process:

Elizabeth was introduced to the financial team, and nurtured a relationship of open communication for the client’s benefit.

Outcome:

46.6M was sheltered from the federal taxable estate.

Narrative:

Husband/wife clients had a 46.6million estate. The husband became ill in 2010, a year in which there was no federal estate tax due to lawmaker’s inability to agree to new plan before the 2001 legislation expired. Due to my regular contact with this client I learned that the husband went into hospice with a prognosis of only two weeks to live. I immediately reached out to the estate attorney, who was unaware of the husband’s illness and hospice status. Together we quickly worked with the family’s financial advisor to move all of the joint assets and all of the wife’s assets, into the husband’s sole name. As a result, upon the husband’s death, all of the assets were included in his estate, but there was no federal estate tax due. The husband’s will left the bulk of the assets to the wife outright. But in order to avoid application of the marital deduction, which would have caused that property to be included in the wife’s taxable estate at her later death, we had the wife renounce her right to receive any outright assets. Under the husband’s will, the wife’s renunciation of the outright bequest resulted in the assets being held in a trust for the wife’s benefit, for her lifetime. Because we did not make an election in the husband’s estate to qualify the wife’s trust for the marital deduction (because no tax was due anyway), the trust worked to give the wife access to all of the assets for the remainder of her life, but also removed the assets from the federal taxable estate at the wife’s later death.

Conclusion:

Elizabeth’s quick thinking and natural liaison skills resulted in preserving this family’s generational wealth.