The expiration of the US estate tax excemption occured December 31st, 2009. Currently, the federal lifetime estate and gift tax exemption for an individual is 3.5 million. According to the UPI, while you can’t predict the future, you can help plan for it. And the key to planning in these uncertain times is flexibility, especially in the estate-planning arena. Unless you are “lucky” enough to die in 2010, the only year that we will not have an estate tax, there will most likely be some bill that must be paid to Uncle Sam at the time of death.
Rather than a cause for celebration, “no one believes that Congress in its ultimate wisdom, with all the deficits looming, with a recession and two wars … would ever allow the estate tax to lapse. But that’s what happened,” said tax attorney Martin Press.
“It’s created great uncertainty,” he told USA Today. The confusion comes, in part, from a wide agreement that Congress will either reinstate the tax that brought in revenues of $26.5 billion in 2008 or shift the tax to a capital gains levy on property that is inherited and then sold. “A lot of middle-income Americans could end up being affected by a tax they never expected,” Marguerite Mount, managing director of the Mercadien Group told the newspaper.
When members of the U.S. Senate finally headed home last week, they also left the future of 50 individual and business tax breaks in limbo. All expired at the end of 2009. To read more