Professionally, my second love is writing this column. My first love is consulting with the people who read it.
Every family I work with is different. So are their businesses, their situations, their problems. In spite of these differences, I’m rarely surprised by anything totally new. But one reader sent me something I had never seen before.
Here’s the story.
After about an hour on the phone discussing an estate plan, son Sam calling at the request of dad Joe agreed to send me some typical information: tax returns, financial statements and a copy of the existing plan. About one week later, a heavy box arrived with a five-inch stack of documents. About four inches worth were nine separate family limited partnerships. They were the same except each partnership owned a different asset: the family business, a residence, investments, etc.
As I thumbed through the papers, I couldn’t help thinking about the drunk who was told, “A shot of whiskey each day is good for you.” The guy who did Joe’s estate plan was clearly drunk on partnerships.
One thing should be made clear: I am an enthusiastic cheerleader for the use of limited partnerships in estate planning. Use ‘em all the time. But this overkill of a single strategy just didn’t do the best possible job.
Using the computations of the adviser, the IRS would get more than $2 million in estate taxes. Another $1.1 million of IRS enrichment was likely because of a gross misuse of the partnership strategy.
What does a family limited partnership accomplish? It allows you as a general partner to totally control the use of any asset transferred to the partnership yet reduce the value of the assets transferred. For example, $1 million of assets transferred to a partnership are usually worth only about $650,000 for tax purposes. That $350,000 discount in a 55 percentestate-tax bracket would reduce your estate-tax burden by $192,500. Not bad!
A familylimited partnership is also a great asset-protection strategy. Creditors can’t get at the assets in the partnership. Neither can divorcing spouses of your kids, who are usually the limited partners.
Used properly, a partnership is almost a perfect tax tool. In general, don’t use them to own the stock of your family business. Nor should one be used for non-income-producing personal assets, like a home or car. It’s a valuable strategy for almost every other asset you might own: publicly traded stocks and bonds, real estate, you name it.
Without covering every detail, we terminated the partnerships that held the family business and two family homes. The business elected S corporation status and was transferred to an intentionally defective trust, and the residences were transferred to qualified personal residence trusts. Those are similar concepts that allow you to heavily discount the value of the assets transferred to them.
We used the liquid assets in two other partnerships to pay the premiums on second-to-die life insurance on Joe and his wife, which was owned by an irrevocable life insurance trust that we created. That trust removes life insurance from the taxable estate of the husband and wife.
When all the smoke clears, Joe and his four children, including Sam, will be enriched $4 million to $7 million more than the original overkill plan, depending on how long Joe and his wife live.
One warning: This is an example of overindulgence in one tax strategy. Although the above descriptions cover the main points of how Joe’s problems were solved., this is not a do-it-yourself kit. There are a number of traps and exceptions. Only proceed with the help of an expert.
