The Capstone
This is one family's complete estate plan, walked from the first document to the last trust. Every decision is a toggle. Flip any of them and watch the savings recompute live. Then switch modes and build the version that fits your own life. Flip Assumptions (top right) to change the rates underneath.
A husband, 50, and a wife, 70, married twelve years. Two children from his prior marriage: a 16 year old, and a 21 year old who is disabled and receives SSI. No estate plan beyond good intentions. Here is what they own.
| Asset | Value | How it is owned |
|---|---|---|
| Home, Raleigh NC (bought 2016 for $2.1M) | $9,254,000 | Tenancy by the entirety |
| Vacation home, Malibu CA | $6,820,000 | Husband |
| Family farm, 1,020 acres NC (inherited, basis $4.18M) | $7,870,000 | Husband |
| Collection (inherited, basis $3.0M, earns nothing) | $10,220,000 | Wife |
| Public stock (basis $1.65M) | $11,230,000 | Joint, no survivorship |
| Bank accounts | $10,391,000 | Mixed individual and joint |
| Vehicles and personal effects | $201,000 | Mixed |
| Total | $55,986,000 |
The baseline with no plan: after two $15,000,000 exclusions, roughly $26,000,000 sits exposed to a flat 40 percent federal estate tax before a dollar of future growth. Everything below is measured against that do nothing case.
Each spouse gets a revocable living trust, a will, a durable power of attorney, a health care power of attorney, and a declaration for a natural death. The trusts hold the assets during life, so nothing needs a courthouse to move at death. The Malibu house matters most here: California real estate in an individual name means a second, ancillary probate in California, where fees are set by statute on the gross value.
At the first death each revocable trust divides by formula. The credit shelter trust takes the exclusion amount and steps out of the survivor's estate forever, so everything it earns from that day forward escapes the second estate tax. The marital trust takes the rest and defers its tax. Relying on portability alone moves the exemption but leaves all the growth exposed.
All three marital trusts earn the same deduction, so this toggle changes control, not tax. With a blended family, a QTIP lets the first spouse decide today that his share ultimately reaches his children, while the survivor receives mandatory income for life. Her side has no children of her own, so a general power of appointment trust or an estate trust serves her.
The house went from $2.1 million to $9.25 million in a decade. A qualified personal residence trust gifts the home today at a discount, because the IRS subtracts the value of the years the family keeps living there. The discount is priced by exactly two dials, the term and the 7520 rate, and by the grantor's age, which sets the odds of surviving the term. Die during the term and the full value returns to the estate.
A vacation home qualifies as the donor's one other residence, with a catch: if it is rented, the family must use it more than the greater of 14 days or 10 percent of the rented days, every single year of the term. Each spouse may run two QPRTs at once, so a couple has four slots.
She inherited a collection now worth $10.2 million with a $3 million basis. It earns nothing, the risk is not diversified, and selling it herself triggers tax on roughly $7.2 million of gain. A charitable remainder trust changes the equation: the trustee sells with no capital gains tax, reinvests the full proceeds, pays her an income for up to 20 years, and the remainder endows the charity she loves.
The charitable gift would otherwise shrink the children's inheritance, so part of the new income stream buys life insurance inside an irrevocable life insurance trust. Funded the clean way, cash gifts to the trustee who buys the policy, there is no three year lookback, and the entire death benefit lands outside the estate. Short withdrawal windows for the beneficiaries turn each premium gift into annual exclusion gifts.
The disabled adult child receives SSI. One dollar of outright inheritance can disqualify her, so every share flowing to her from any trust in this plan pours into a single third party special needs trust that supplements her benefits without replacing them. The 16 year old cannot legally take property outright, so his shares collect in his own trust with staged distributions. These two trusts protect people, not tax brackets, and they are the reason the rest of the structure exists.
Every figure is an illustration from the stated assumptions, not a projection or advice. Real numbers require appraisals, current IRS actuarial factors, and counsel.
The Wealth Guide walks wealth through its seasons, and protection only matters if the planting happened first. Two tools every saver should run before a single trust gets drafted. The risk free rate below is live, the same 10 year Treasury yield the assumptions box uses.
The match is an instant 100 percent return before a dollar of market growth. Deferring less than the match cap is declining free money.
Judge a diversified portfolio by beta and the Treynor ratio; judge a concentrated one by standard deviation and the Sharpe ratio. This is the same math an algorithmic advisor runs continuously, and it is the direction this guide is headed: transparent, computed, and yours to check.
Tap what describes your life, put in round numbers, and the guide assembles the strategy stack a planner would walk you through, with the same illustrative math as the case study. Nothing you enter is stored or sent anywhere.
The big picture first: wealth is preserved with two levers, FREEZING an asset so its future growth escapes the estate, and DISCOUNTING it so it moves out at less than its face value. Below the exclusion these levers do not matter yet. As an estate climbs toward and past it, and especially in the roughly $25M to $35M range where planners see the heaviest activity, the grantor retained and split interest trusts take over: you push the asset out, keep the use or the income, and the gift is valued at what the asset is worth today, not what it will be worth. Every card below is tagged with its job, freeze, discount, control, protection, charity, or liquidity, because knowing WHY a trust exists is what separates picking a tool from understanding one. The lit cards match the profile you tapped above.