ENG2406. Planning for a Surviving Spouse (EST, TAX)

This session will begin by analyzing the most common estate and gift tax planning techniques for the surviving spouse, such as marital deduction planning, gifting to spousal lifetime access trusts, lifetime QTIP trusts, the efficacy of portability and similar planning. We will then venture into more creative planning techniques such as nonreciprocal SLATs, techniques that hedge the risks of trust funding where the transferor spouse survives the donee spouse, planning in second marriages with prior children, and other issues that the modern couple confronts. We will also examine how to design trust terms for the surviving spouse.

Learning Objectives:

• Compare sophisticated estate and gift tax planning techniques for the surviving spouse.
• Identify dilemmas and pitfalls in estate and gift tax planning for the surviving spouse.
• Analyze trust designs for the surviving spouse.