You have worked hard to build a good life. Thoughtful estate planning helps that work continue to benefit the people, businesses, and causes you care about. When your goals call for more than a basic plan, the right trust or ownership arrangement can create useful opportunities for your family.
Advanced planning starts with a conversation about those goals. Perhaps your business is growing, you want to provide for your spouse and children from an earlier marriage, or you hope to make a lasting charitable gift. Spiro Verras helps you understand the choices, including what each arrangement asks of you during your lifetime and what it can accomplish for the next generation.
Explore this guide: The questions that matter · Planning for your family · Planning for particular assets · A lasting legacy · Putting the plan together
The questions that matter
For 2026, the federal estate and gift tax basic exclusion amount is $15 million per person. Prior taxable gifts affect how much remains available, and preserving a deceased spouse’s unused exclusion generally requires a portability election on an estate tax return. Your family’s likely future wealth, ownership arrangements, and state or international connections also matter.
Tax planning is one part of the conversation. A well-designed trust can also establish how a spouse will be supported, how children will receive an inheritance, and who will make decisions when you cannot. Before selecting a technique, we work through three practical questions.
Which assets should fund the plan?
An asset that has already appreciated presents a different question from one expected to grow substantially in the future. Lifetime gifts generally carry the donor’s income tax basis, while property included in a person’s estate may qualify for a basis adjustment at death. Moving property outside the taxable estate can therefore save estate tax while changing the family’s future capital gains tax exposure.
Cash, investments, business interests, real estate, and insurance each have their own considerations. We compare the expected benefit with your need for income, liquidity, and flexibility, then coordinate the funding plan with your CPA and financial adviser.
Who reports the income and pays the tax?
A trust can be irrevocable and still be treated as owned by you for income tax purposes. With this kind of grantor trust, you generally report its income under the applicable reporting rules. A nongrantor trust may file its own Form 1041, pay tax on retained income, and report taxable distributions to beneficiaries on Schedule K-1. A gift tax return is a separate question and can be required even when no gift tax is payable.
What protection and access will the family have?
Estate tax treatment, access to trust property, and protection from creditors are separate questions. Properly designed spendthrift and discretionary provisions can help protect a beneficiary’s inheritance while it remains in trust, subject to applicable exceptions. Protection for someone who contributes the property follows different rules. Florida law, the trust’s terms, and the circumstances of a transfer all deserve attention.
Planning for your family
Supporting a spouse and preserving an inheritance
A qualified terminable interest property trust, or QTIP trust, can provide income for a surviving spouse while directing the remaining property to chosen beneficiaries after the spouse’s death. It is often useful when a couple wants both financial security for the survivor and clarity for children. With the required election and qualifying terms, it can defer estate tax through the marital deduction.
A bypass or credit shelter trust uses the first spouse’s available estate tax exclusion and can keep later growth outside the surviving spouse’s taxable estate. The survivor may still receive benefits under carefully drafted terms. Comparing this approach with a QTIP trust and portability includes both estate tax and income tax basis considerations.
Sharing future growth during your lifetime
A spousal lifetime access trust, or SLAT, allows one spouse to make a completed gift to a trust that can benefit the other spouse and additional family members. It can transfer future appreciation while preserving potential support for the beneficiary spouse. Planning for a death, divorce, and changing financial needs is part of making the arrangement fit.
A grantor retained annuity trust, or GRAT, pays you a specified annuity for a term. Property remaining afterward passes to the chosen beneficiaries. Investment performance, the applicable federal valuation rate, and survival through the term determine how effectively it transfers wealth.
Planning for particular assets
A home with a future in the family
A qualified personal residence trust, or QPRT, lets you retain the right to use a home for a fixed term while making a gift of the future ownership interest. We consider your plans for living there afterward, the home’s basis, and Florida homestead issues alongside the potential estate tax benefit.
Insurance that supports the wider plan
An irrevocable life insurance trust, or ILIT, can manage insurance proceeds for your beneficiaries and, when properly structured, keep those proceeds outside your taxable estate. Policy ownership, premium gifts, and ongoing administration matter. A policy newly purchased by a trust and an existing policy transferred to it require different analysis.
A business or shared family investments
A family limited partnership or family limited liability company can establish management responsibilities, guide succession, and organize shared ownership. Valuation discounts, when appropriate, depend on the actual interests and restrictions and require support; the entity’s name does not create a discount.
In suitable circumstances, a sale to a grantor trust can exchange an asset’s future growth for a promissory note. This calls for careful valuation, appropriate funding, realistic repayment terms, and a separate review of estate and income tax consequences.
Retirement accounts bring another set of rules. An IRA beneficiary trust may help manage an inherited account for a beneficiary, with close attention to payout requirements and income taxes.
A lasting legacy
A charitable remainder trust combines payments to individual beneficiaries for a defined period with an eventual gift to charity. It may suit appreciated property and a meaningful charitable goal. The trust’s tax treatment, the taxation of beneficiary payments, and the available charitable deduction require separate calculations.
A dynasty trust can support several generations with a thoughtful framework for distributions and stewardship. Its tax results depend on funding, generation-skipping transfer tax planning, and administration. Trustee selection and room to respond to changing family circumstances are just as important as duration.
Putting the plan together
The most useful plan is one your family can understand and your advisers can administer. Spiro coordinates the legal work with the people who know your finances, identifies the records and returns the arrangement will require, and helps you see how the pieces work together. You can also explore our guide to the trusts Spiro prepares and our discussion of trusts and asset protection.
Contact Verras Law to arrange a consultation by appointment in Palm Harbor, Tampa, or St. Petersburg, or by Zoom or teleconference.
Sources and further reading
This overview addresses federal tax principles and Florida planning. Other states and international connections may change the analysis. Primary resources include the IRS’s estate tax questions and answers, Form 1041 instructions, and Revenue Ruling 2023-2 on basis; Florida’s rules for creditors of a trust’s settlor; and the IRS’s charitable remainder trust guidance. Each linked trust guide explains its subject in greater depth.