Original Message ----- 
From: "Anne Pemberton" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Saturday, January 06, 2007 12:26 PM
Subject: Re: Carter's Grove to be sold


> Two financial tools are useful in preparing for the inheritance tax. The one
> most suggested is to purchase a life insurance policy designed to pay the
> inheritance taxes upon death. 

Such a policy would be very expensive....the premiums for an elderly landowner almost prohibitive if, indeed, he could even obtain a policy. Remember, these are people who are not "rich". They do not usually have tons of cash sitting around with which to go buy expensive insurance policies. Their wealth is in their land which no one in the family wants to sell. Most of them just want to do what they've always done: be left alone to farm.

The other, perhaps a little fraught with
> potential mischief, is for the pre-dying elder owner to pass title to the
> next generation before death.
 My mother-in-law did this, selling her home to
> her daughter for $1 in exchange of a home to live in until her death, and
> there was then no estate to pay taxes on (also the value was below that of
> the inheritance tax). Financial planning and responsibility in life can
> offset the effects of the inheritance tax.
You provided your own response when you said that the value of the house was below the inheritance tax rate. If the property is below the minimum amount to be estate taxed then there was never an estate tax problem. It is totally illegal to sell for one dollar or give away real estate that is valued at more than one million dollars to an heir or anyone else.
The secret to successfully dealing with the estate tax is, voila! Repeal it.
Or, at the very least, fix it so that a farmer isn't taxed at the exact same rate as Bill Gates and Warren Buffett and other billionaires who tend to think that the death tax is justifiable......to which I say, I guess they do! Their heirs could pay 99% of the Gates or Buffett estate and STILL be billionaires.
The estate tax is one of the most onerous, most unfair, most egregious examples of the government's attempts to redistibute wealth.
If anyone ever gets to studying the way it has been handled it would blow your mind!
For example, under current law the death tax is being incrementally reduced until the year 2010 when it disappears entirely for, what? Twelve months. At the end of which (precisely 12:01 A.M., January 1, 2011) the entire thing comes roaring back full tilt to the level that is was  before these "reforms".....which is why cynics call 2010 the "Throw Momma From The Train Year".

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