In an article for the New Jersey Law Journal, private client attorneys Lisa Presser and Brian Balduzzi outline several upstream estate planning techniques to preserve family wealth, along with their associated risks and strategies to address them.
Presser and Balduzzi explain that rising federal estate, gift, and generation-skipping transfer tax exclusion amounts have resulted in fewer estates being subject to death taxes upon an elderly family member’s passing. They observe that coordinating sophisticated estate planning across generations can help families mitigate death taxes and reduce income taxes.
“Advisers should ask their clients about their other family members and incorporate discussions of this upstream estate planning into their next meeting and consider the intersection of income and estate tax planning across the generations within these families,” the authors conclude.
