Tuesday, April 03, 2007

Preparing for life after cash out - Yahoo! News

Preparing for life after cash out - Yahoo! News: "With the sale of a business or a large concentrated asset holding, there is the creation of liquid wealth. I've seen it work out exceptionally well and not so well,' he says. 'The difference is the level of planning and how the proceeds are invested at the point of liquidity and beyond. It's a good problem, but it's still a problem and you need to optimise the solutions.'

There are several pre-liquidity strategies that can help lower federal transfer taxes, which include the gift tax, the estate tax and the generation-skipping transfer (or 'GST') tax. They range from basic steps such as taking advantage of the annual gift tax exclusion - you can make annual gifts of up to $12,000 tax-free to any number of people, with a lifetime exclusion of $1m per donor - to setting up a Grantor Retained Annuity Trust (GRAT) and making an instalment sale to a Grantor Trust."

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