With a Little Estate Planning, Your House Can Stay in the Family
New York Times, January 21st, 2006
CAUTION: Reading this article may provoke self-inflicted slaps to
the head and utterances of "Why didn't I do this five years ago?"
In 1999, Farhad Aghdami, a
trust lawyer in Richmond, Va., suggested to Jim and Yolonda Roberts
that they put their home in a Qualified Personal Residence Trust to
shelter it from looming estate taxes.
Piedmont Lodge, the
Robertses' white clapboard house with six portico columns sitting on 53
acres near Keswick, Va., was worth about $1.6 million back then. The
trust lets them give the property to their four children for about a
third of what it was valued at in 1999. The couple, now 75 years old,
can live in the home for the 10-year term of the trust. When the trust
expires in three years, the house belongs to the children.
Here's
where you slap yourself. The home is probably worth close to $4 million
now. All of that appreciation was removed from the Roberts estate. "We
are very happy with how it worked out," said Mr. Roberts, a retired
Exxon executive. "We love the house and wanted to keep it in the
family."
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