Insight

Beware if your estate plan leaves specific assets to specific heirs

Planning your estate around specific assets is risky and, in most cases, should be avoided. If you leave specific assets — such as homes, cars or stock — to specific people, you may inadvertently disinherit them.

Illustrating the problem

Let’s say Debbie has three children — Abbie, Mary Kate and Lizzie — and wishes to treat them equally in her estate plan. In her will, Debbie leaves a $500,000 mutual fund to Abbie and her home valued at $500,000 to Mary Kate. She also names Lizzie as beneficiary of a $500,000 life insurance policy.

When Debbie dies years later, the mutual fund balance has grown to $750,000. In addition, she had sold the home for $750,000, invested the proceeds in the mutual fund and allowed the life insurance policy to lapse. But she neglected to revise her will. The result? Abbie receives the mutual fund, with a balance of $1.5 million, and Mary Kate and Lizzie are disinherited.

Even if Debbie continued to own the home, it could have declined in value after she drafted her will (rather than increased), leaving Mary Kate with less than her sisters.

Avoiding this outcome

It’s generally preferable to divide your estate based on dollar values or percentages rather than specific assets. Debbie, for example, could have placed the mutual fund, home and insurance policy in a trust and divided the value of the trust equally between her three children.

If it’s important to you that specific assets go to specific heirs — for example, because you want your oldest child to receive the family home or you want your family business to go to a child who works for the company — there are planning techniques you can use to avoid undesired consequences. For example, your trust might provide for your assets to be divided equally but also provide for your children to receive specific assets at fair market value as part of their shares. If you have questions regarding the division of your assets to your heirs, contact us. We can review your plan and address your concerns.

© 2019

Related Insights

Discover if you qualify for “head of household” tax filing status | cpa in harford county md | Weyrich, Cronin & Sorra

Tax Prep, Planning & Strategy

Discover if you qualify for “head of household” tax filing status

When we prepare your tax return, we’ll check one of the following filing statuses: single, married filing jointly, married filing separately,…
Are you a tax-favored real estate professional? | accounting firm in bel air md | Weyrich, Cronin & Sorra

Tax Prep, Planning & Strategy

Are you a tax-favored real estate professional?

For federal income tax purposes, the general rule is that rental real estate losses are passive activity losses (PALs). An individual taxpayer…
Should your nonprofit outsource to an AMC? | business consulting and accounting services in elkton | weyrich, cronin and sorra

Non-Profits

Should your nonprofit outsource to an AMC?

If you’re like most nonprofit leaders, you want to dedicate your time to mission-critical work. But if you run a relatively new nonprofit with…

Connect with us

Use the form below to send us an email. WCS responds directly to all inquiries and general questions within 24 hours of posting.

This contact form is deactivated because you refused to accept Google reCaptcha service which is necessary to validate any messages sent by the form.