Are There Any Tax Implications When an Estate Is Settled?
Video Summary
Are there any tax implications when an estate is settled? The number one, is Florida has done away with estate taxes, and the federal government has raised the federal estate tax limitation in 2024 to above $13 million. So, there’s no estate tax implications in most estates in Florida. The personal representative is charged with filing a tax return for the estate for any income that it received. And so, the tax implications are, is that you deduct the administration costs from the income of the estate, and if there’s any income that’s been distributed out to the beneficiaries, they’ll receive K one and must pay income tax on it. One of the big benefits of inheriting property, however, is you get what they call a step up in basis and the property. If you inherit property or stock, and that you take the asset at the date of death value. And so, if the date of death value is a hundred thousand dollars and you later sell it for a hundred thousand dollars, you don’t have to recognize any gain. You don’t have to go back and determine how much the decedent paid for the property. If you have any questions, give me a call at (727) 847-2288.
- Published in Estate Planning, Taxes, Videos
How Much Can You Leave Beneficiaries Without Facing Estate Tax?
Video Summary
How much can you leave a beneficiary without them having to pay any estate taxes, or rather the estate having to pay any estate taxes? The federal limitation is now up to over $12 million, so you can leave them up to $12 million and not have any federal estate taxes. As far as your estate’s concerned, in Florida, they’ve done away with estate taxes, so the total that you can leave without any federal estate taxes to all the beneficiaries of your estate is anything up to about $12 million. In fact, that goes up every year, and right now it’s a little bit over that amount. So, if you have any questions, give me a call at (727) 847-2288.
- Published in Estate Planning, Taxes, Videos
Does A Living Trust Avoid Estate and Probate Taxes?
Video Summary
Does a living trust avoid estate and probate taxes? The answer to that question is no, it does not. So let let’s talk about the estate taxes in the state of Florida, Florida has done away with their estate tax. The federal government has raised the federal estate tax limit to 11.8 million. So if your estate is less than, 11.8 million, you don’t have to worry about probate taxes. Also if it’s you live in Florida, your Florida assets are not subject to estate taxes. The only time that you may be concerned about estate taxes is if you own real estate outside the state of Florida, wherever the real estate is situated, then that state may have an estate as far as that’s concerned, as far as probate taxes. They’re not necessarily a probate tax that as far as probate expenses, which is primary attorney fees and it can avoid probate. But there still may be some attorney fees involved as far as the administration of the estate. So if you have any questions about your revocable trust, we’ll give a call at (727) 847-2288.
- Published in Estate Planning, Taxes, Videos
Is Retirement Income Taxable to a Beneficiary?
Video Summary
Is retirement income taxable to a beneficiary? I’m assuming that retirement income is coming from an individual retirement account or an IRA. If it is, then it may not be taxable. If it comes from an Roth IRA account, those, uh, distributions are not taxable. Uh, as far as they’re just not taxable. If it’s not a Roth IRA, then the money received from a retirement income is taxable. And so you do have to pay tax on whatever the distributions are. There are usually various options as to how you can take that. If someone passes away and you inherit an IRA, whether or not you can defer that or take it in a lump sum, depends on what type of IRA is involved. As far as retirement income is concerned as to whether an audit is taxable. If you have any questions, give me a call at (727) 847-2288.
- Published in Estate Planning, Taxes, Videos
Ask Thomas Mitchell: How Do Capital Gains Affect Me?
Video Summary
I’m Tom Mitchell. I’m a law partner at Waller and Mitchell in New Port Richey, Florida and I want to speak to you this afternoon for a minute or two about capital gains taxation. The capital gains tax is a tax that is levied on the sale of appreciated assets, based on the profit that you make when you sell.
There are two types of capital gains: short term and long term. Short-term are for assets held less than a year. Those get taxed as ordinary income. Long-term capital gains are those held more than a year and they get taxed at a special rate somewhere between 10 percent and 15 percent, depending on your other income.
So exactly what can be a capital asset that is subject to the tax? Pretty much anything, other than something you hold in inventory in your business or as stock and trade, so even cars and personal effects in your house are technically capital assets that could be subject to the tax. Of course, nobody keeps any records on those kinds of things, so very seldom do we see that, unless you have a very expensive painting or something with documentation. But the most common things that we talk about are stocks, bonds, mutual funds and real estate.
Now, real estate includes your personal residence. However, there’s a specific exemption in the law for personal residences, for a married couple of gain of less than $500,000.00 and for a single-person gain of less than $250,000.00, but that’s the single exemption that’s specific to the Internal Revenue Code.
So what happens in a capital gain transaction? How do they compute the tax? Well, they take the purchase price that you paid for the property to start with and they call that “basis” in the tax trade and they add to the basis any structural improvements that you may have made to the property, then when you sell it they subtract that from the selling price to come up with the gain. Then they apply a 15 percent tax rate to the gain to get you the tax.
So let’s take an example. You buy a vacation home up in North Carolina and you pay $100,000.00 for it. The next year you put a deck on the back of the property. The deck’s worth $10,000.00, so you have got $110,000.00 invested in the property. In 2002, more than one year later, you sell the property for $210,000.00, so your gain is the $210,000.00 minus the $110,000.00, or $100,000.00 and the tax due on that transaction at the 15 percent rate is $15,000.00.
So, if you have any questions about capital gains tax or any other tax issues, give me a call. This is Tom Mitchell at Waller and Mitchell, my telephone number (727) 847-2288.