EST2014. Deep Dive into Spousal Lifetime Access Trusts (SLATS)

Spousal lifetime access trusts (“SLATs”) planning can provide tremendous planning benefits for many married clients. They may well be the most popular technique to plan for married clients (and others) in 2020. The massive federal expenditures to restart the economy because of the Covid pandemic, according to many, will result in substantial tax increases, including the estate tax. 

Every practitioner needs to be comfortable and knowledgeable of SLAT planning and techniques. With proper tailoring for the current environment, a useful default estate and financial planning strategy are to employ non-reciprocal SLATs. This can provide a flexible framework for a wide range of clients and can achieve an array of planning goals. The technique can be adapted for modest estates needing life insurance trusts and vehicles to use some of the temporary high exemption, to ultra-high net worth clients requiring more aggressive tax-oriented estate planning, e.g. sales of discounted assets to a grantor trust. Many anticipate that the transfer tax system will be made harsher in the near future to help pay the government bailouts. Some variations of SLAT planning may remain useful to many married clients. This webinar will provide a practical how-to discussion of how to plan and draft a SLAT plan.