Death And Taxes: Forbes’ Practical Guide For Families
Key takeaways
- Those messages led me to create this guide as a starting point for families, executors, surviving spouses, and beneficiaries.
- Burton for ForbesWhere Someone Dies Can Change the Cost READ MOREMost families don’t need to worry about the federal estate tax.
- Twelve states and the District of Columbia impose estate taxes, and all but one have far lower exemptions–three are $2 million or less.
Advice for survivors on everything from state inheritance and estate taxes to inherited IRAs to sorting through a lifetime of possessions and papers. Plus, sparing your own heirs.You expect the death of a spouse, parent or other close relative to be emotionally wrenching. What catches many survivors by surprise are the daunting and draining administrative, tax and practical tasks that follow–from tax returns and probate to sifting through a lifetime of papers and possessions. When my dad died suddenly last October, I was intellectually prepared for these tasks, since I’m a tax and estates attorney as well as a journalist. Yet my own family’s experience reminded me that the complicated rules don’t always line up or work smoothly. After I wrote about how my widowed mother went for five months without benefits because of problems dealing with a staff-short Social Security Administration, I received emails and texts from families wrestling with similar or worse problems, as well as all sorts of practical questions about estates.
Those messages led me to create this guide as a starting point for families, executors, surviving spouses, and beneficiaries. It’s a how-to for spotting tricky issues and points you to resources (including a checklist, tables, and a map) on the topics that most often lead to tax and other unpleasant surprises after death. It also offers readers suggestions on ways to reduce the tax and administrative burden on their own heirs.
Illustration by C.J. Burton for ForbesWhere Someone Dies Can Change the Cost READ MOREMost families don’t need to worry about the federal estate tax. The current federal exemption from the tax ($15 million per person, or $30 million per married couple) is high enough that little more than one in a thousand estates is hit with the federal levy