After eating tainted 'hush puppies' at a famous barbecue restaurant in High Point, they were both rushed to the hospital but didn't survive. Avoiding such dire consequences is not difficult for an attorney skilled in estate planning. The difficult part for many business owners is taking time from their busy schedules to examine the goals they would like their estate planning to accomplish and then assemble a team to draft a plan to accomplish these goals. Even when a tax threat has been identified, a qualified attorney hired and appropriate documents drafted, many business owners become distracted by that big sale, inventory problem or new warehouse construction. They either fail to sign any of the documents, or have the misconception that once the estate planning documents are written and signed, their estate planning is complete.
Nothing can be further from the truth.
Estate planning must be an ongoing process, because as business conditions and tax laws change, periodic review of your estate plan is required. Yet even with hundreds of thousands of tax dollars at stake, some business owners become uneasy at the mere thought of an asset being re-titled to some entity, even if that other entity is their trust in which they are the sole trustee. Proper asset balancing between you and your spouse will be necessary to ensure a maximum use of each unified credit. Typically, many assets are owned jointly. However, jointly owned assets can not be used against the unified credit because they qualify for the unlimited marital deduction between spouses.