You should remember that this answer is provided within the spirit of public education, not as legal suggestions. If you need legal suggestions for a particular scenario, you need to consult an attorney.
A life insurance trust is really a trust which is set up for the purpose of owning a life insurance policy. If the insured is the owner of ones policy, the proceeds of your policy will likely be subject to estate tax when he or she dies. However, when he moves ownership to a life insurance trust, the profits will probably be entirely no cost of estate tax. (The takings will be exempt from income tax either way.)
Because of the current estate tax rate of 35%, a life insurance trust can help to save a lot of cash in estate taxes. Even so, you’ll find a number of downsides to such an agreement:
1. You can not change the beneficiary of your policy.
The insured will have to give up the right to alter the beneficiary of the policy (the trust itself is going to be the beneficiary). The trustee alone has that power, plus the insured cannot function as trustee of his own life insurance trust. Naturally, the insured will designate the beneficiaries of the trust (as an example, his youngsters). But because this designation can’t be changed right after the life insurance trust has been set up, the insured will lack the flexibility to deal with changed family members situations with this particular policy.
2. You cannot borrow from the policy.
The insured cannot borrow from the policy. If the trust makes it possible for him to borrow against the policy, he will be deemed to be an owner of ones policy for estate tax purposes.
3. You can’t transfer an existing policy to the trust — if you don’t live for a minimum of three additional years.
If the insured transfers a current policy to a life insurance trust and dies within the next three years, he will likely be viewed as the owner of the policy and it is going to be taxed in his estate. Even if he survives past 3 years, he will have created a taxable gift within the amount of the cash value of one’s policy (naturally, this really is typically better than having the entire face value subject to estate taxes). If the life insurance trust takes out a new policy on the insured’s life, on the other hand, the insured will in no way be deemed to own the policy. Furthermore, no money value will have built up yet, so no taxable gift will likely be produced.
4. The life insurance trust have to be irrevocable.
As soon as you set up and fund the trust, you cannot get the policy back. When you develop into non insurable, you may be committed to this trust as your only life insurance.
5. Premium payments may use up your estate tax exemption.
If the policy has not yet endowed, you need to discover a method to pay the premiums without making use of up your estate and gift tax exemption. Should you transfer securities to the trust to ensure that the trustee will have income with which to pay the premiums, the full value of ones securities is going to be a taxable gift. In the event you transfer money to the trust every year to pay the premiums, each and every transfer is going to be a taxable gift. Nonetheless, you might be able to exempt these premium payments from gift or estate taxes by setting the life insurance trust up as a Crummey Trust. Then every premium payment might be protected by your annual gift tax exclusion, which is $13,000 (indexed for inflation) per trust beneficiary.
6. You need to uncover or hire a trustee.
The insured can’t serve as trustee of the life insurance trust. That means that he will have to come across or hire a third party trustee. On the other hand, several banks and trust corporations offer you reduced fees for life insurance trusts simply because they involve essentially no investing decisions.
Regardless of these disadvantages, many individuals come across that the tax saving potential of a life insurance trust is worth the price and hassle. It permits you to remove from your estate a significant asset that you are unlikely to want access to throughout your life. And it ensures that the life insurance proceeds go 100% to the beneficiaries, not the federal government.
To search for more interesting facts about life insurance trust, please have a look at what is a beneficiary .