Estate Planning With Grantor TrustsEstate Planning With Grantor Trusts

Grantor trusts have been at the heart of most leveraged estate-planning techniques since the publication of Revenue Ruling 85-13.¹ In this ruling, the Internal Revenue Service established the now widely accepted premise that a transfer to and from a grantor trust is a disregarded (ignored) transaction for income tax purposes as long as the trust retains its grantor trust status. These transactions are ignored even though they’re given full effect for purposes of estate, gift and generation-skipping transfer taxes. This lack of coordination between the income tax system and the transfer tax system has enabled transfers of assets, such as businesses and real estate, with a value that greatly exceeds the available transfer tax exemptions. T...