Estate Lawyers Protecting Businesses and Families
Family business interests are included in your estate for federal estate tax purposes. These businesses are often difficult to value, as well as highly taxed. Therefore, they can cause serious liquidity problems upon the owner’s death. You need an experienced estate attorney who can explain your options and advise you as to how to take advantage of options such as the gift tax annual exclusion and unified tax credit.
Owners of family businesses often choose to create a business succession plan to make the transition of control of the business as seamless as possible, and to avoid tax problems. The experienced estate planning lawyers at KGG can help you keep your business in the family or leave it to a group of employees or co-founders.
What are My Options for Business Succession Planning?
We can advise you on leveraging techniques to reduce the tax burden upon transfers of control of family businesses to younger generations, including:
- Gifts of minority interests
- Family limited partnerships
When these estate planning tools are properly used, family businesses can be transferred to younger generations with a minimum of estate and gift tax consequences.
Can Business Succession Planning Protect My Family’s Inheritance?
Family businesses are to be valued highly, and each one has its own story and should have a future carefully planned for it specifically. Some people want to leave the family business as a gift to their children. In other cases, some want their heirs to earn that privilege or to have the business assets carefully managed for them. Effective estate planning can involve making provisions intended to avoid the problems which can be the result of inheriting too much, too young.
Provisions for effective transitions in the management and control of a closely-held business are extremely important. We can help you address business succession issues with documents such as buy-sell agreements (typically funded with life insurance), shareholder agreements (sometimes providing for post-death redemptions by the corporation) and voting trusts.
Need a Lawyer for Estate Law and Business Succession Planning?
If you need help planning the succession of your family’s business contact our estate lawyers toll free today at (800) 711-5258. We can also be reached via our online form to schedule a consultation in Rockland County, NY or Bergen County, NJ. If you leave us a message, we will get back with you promptly.
Our estate law department can assist you with: wills, trusts, durable powers of attorney, and many other matters. If you need to meet with us in the evening we will work to accommodate you.
