Video Summary
What are the estate taxes for 2013? Everyone’s heard a lot about the fiscal cliff. Well, what happened as far as our estate taxes? They were due to be reduced to $1 million, meaning that if your estate exceeded $1 million, there would be Federal estate taxes. Well, in the bill that was passed through Congress, they adopted an exclusion for Federal estate taxes of $5 million, which takes care of most of my clients anyway. And so if you have less than $5 million in assets whenever you pass away, there is no Federal estate tax.
Florida does not have an estate tax. And in fact, the $5 million has been adjusted for inflation, so for the year 2013, you can have up to $5.25 million and have no estate taxes. It even gets better than that if you’re married and you leave all your assets to your spouse. When your spouse passes away, the two of you can leave to your children or whomever you would like up to $10.5 million. That’s called portability, meaning that the unused portion of the estate tax exemption that you did not use, that portion of the $5.25 million, can be transferred to your surviving spouse so that that can be applied to the assets which they leave behind for your children or whoever they leave them to.
So what does this mean to you? If you already have a trust, you need to call and make an appointment and come in and see about us revising your trust because more than likely, it has a provision in there that you provide that your assets are to be held in an irrevocable trust upon your death for your spouse. That was in an effort to avoid estate taxes when it was less than the present dollar amount. And you probably want your spouse to have the use of all those funds and discretion, which they will not have under your current trust provision.
So I urge you to set up an appointment to review your trust documents. So give me a call at (727) 847-2288 and I’ll be glad to check with you about the taxes and also set you up an appointment to review your trust.