INDIVIDUAL SERVICES
Trust & Estate Planning Services
With a focus on reducing estate taxes, protecting assets, and ensuring a smooth transfer of wealth, Evans Sternau CPA develops customized trust and estate planning strategies that reflect your complex financial needs.
Planning Essentials
Key Reasons Trust & Estate Planning is Important
Trust estate planning serves as an essential tool to protect your financial legacy while safeguarding your family members. Working with a CPA at Evans Sternau provides you access to expert guidance which helps you create well-structured tax-efficient trust and estate planning strategies.
A certified public accountant provides expertise to help clients understand estate and trust planning laws while reducing tax obligations and achieving financial objectives that support long-term wealth protection. Your planning process becomes clearer and more confident when you involve a CPA who helps you create trusts and update your estate plan and work with legal counsel.
- Tax Expertise
- Financial Insight
- Compliance
- Income Planning
- Long Term Financial Planning
- Holistic Approach
Effortless Legacy Transfer
Ensure a Seamless Wealth Transfer Process
Trust and estate planning is about ensuring your wealth and legacy transition smoothly to the next generation without unnecessary delays, taxes, or family disputes. At Evans Sternau CPA, we engineer a transfer process that’s efficient, tax-smart, and tailored to your family’s unique needs. Here’s how we make it happen:
Avoid Probate and Legal Complications
While many advisors focus solely on wills, a CPA-led approach integrates trusts, beneficiary designations, and gifting strategies to keep assets out of court. Besides anticipating potential disputes, we’ll help you structure your ownership through revocable living trusts or joint accounts with rights of survivorship.
Protect Beneficiaries from Unnecessary Tax Burdens
Without proper structuring, your beneficiaries could face income taxes on distributions, capital gains on inherited assets, or even state inheritance taxes.
Our CPAs go beyond basic trust and estate planning by leveraging stepped-up basis to minimize capital gains on inherited property. We can also optimize trust types to control tax exposure or give advice on how you can use gifts to minimize liabilities.
Preserve Family Wealth Across Generations
Without guidance, inherited assets often get squandered, mismanaged, or drained by creditors. Our team has the experience and technical know-how to design plans that stagger distributions to protect heirs from impulsive decisions. We can also help you shield assets from divorces, lawsuits, or irresponsible spending through discretionary trusts.
Advanced Trust Planning
Specialized Trust & Estate Planning Strategies
Trusts estate planning doesn’t stop with a will and some beneficiaries forms. If you’ve built a stupendous fortune, cookie-cutter solutions won’t cut it. At Evans Sternau CPA, we deploy advanced strategies that blend tax efficiency, control, and legacy planning, so your estate works for you, not against you.
Charitable Lead Trusts for Philanthropy & Tax Benefits
Want to support causes you care about while reducing your taxable estate? A Charitable Lead Trust (CLT) lets you direct income to a charity for a set period, with remaining assets passing to heirs, often at a steeply discounted tax value.
Sales to Grantor Trusts for Tax-Efficient Asset Transfers
Got a family business or appreciating assets you want to move out of your estate? A sale to an intentionally defective grantor trust (IDGT) lets you “freeze: the taxable value of assets now, while future growth happens tax-free for heirs.
Gift Trusts & ILITs to Maximize Wealth Distribution
Annual gifting can whittle down your taxable estate, but without structure, those gifts might just fund a beneficiary’s next sports car. We can help you set up dynasty trusts to stretch wealth across generations or inheritor’s trusts with spendthrift protections to safeguard assets from creditors or ex-spouses.
65-Day Rule Distributions for Tax Optimization
Most trustees wait until December 31st to make trust distributions, missing a golden opportunity. The “65-Day Rule” lets you retroactively treat early-year payouts as prior-year distributions, which can shift income to beneficiaries in lower tax brackets, avoid pushing the trust itself into higher tax tiers, and correct under-distributions from the previous year.
Who Can Benefit?
Who Benefits from Trust & Estate Planning?
Trusts estate planning isn’t just for the ultra-wealthy. Sure, if you’ve got a nine-figure net worth, you definitely need it. But even if you’re “just” comfortable, a smart plan can mean the difference between leaving a legacy and leaving a mess. Here’s who we help most with our professional estate and trust planning services:
Individuals with Significant Assets:
Business Owners Planning for Succession:
Your business is likely your biggest asset, and also biggest liability if transitioned poorly.
Families Seeking Multi-Generational Wealth Preservation:
Nearly 70% of family wealth disappears by the second generation. Not because of taxes, but because of bad planning.
Charitable Donors Seeking Optimized Tax Benefits for Their Giving:
If philanthropy is part of your legacy, there’s no reason to leave money on the table. Our CPAs help clients align their giving with their broader tax and estate strategy.
Legacy Through Trust
How We Can Help
Charitable Remainder Trust
By leveraging the expertise of a CPA, individuals can maximize the benefits of a Charitable Remainder Trust (CRT), making it a powerful tool for both personal financial management and charitable giving. Trusts estate planning is increasingly common for individuals to have due to:
• Various Tax Benefits
• Philanthropic Goals
• Estate Planning
CPAs have a deep understanding of tax laws and regulations, ensuring that the CRT is structured in a way that maximizes tax benefits while complying with legal requirements. They also can integrate the CRT into your overall trust and estate planning strategy, considering your income needs, tax implications, and estate planning goals.
Revocable Trust
A revocable trust is a flexible estate planning tool that can offer numerous benefits for individuals. Here are key reasons why establishing a revocable trust is important:
• Control Over Assets
• Privacy
• Simplifies Estate Administration
A revocable trust can work in conjunction with other trusts estate planning documents, like wills and powers of attorney, providing a comprehensive estate and trust planning approach. By engaging a CPA to help establish and manage a revocable trust, individuals can ensure that their estate planning is thorough, efficient, and aligned with their financial and personal goals.
Trust Strategies
Estate & Gift Planning Solutions
Charitable Remainder Trust (CRT)
Look, if you’re the kind of person who writes checks to charity but also doesn’t want to eat ramen in retirement, a Charitable Remainder Trust might be your jam. Here’s how it works in trust and estate planning: You dump assets (stocks, real estate, whatever) into an irrevocable trust. The trust then pays you (or your kids) a nice income stream for years, maybe even your whole life. Then, when you’re gone (or the term’s up), whatever’s left goes to your favorite nonprofit.
Charitable Lead Trust (CLT)
Want to support charity now and pass wealth to your kids later? Enter the Charitable Lead Trust (CLT). With this trust estate planning tool, your chosen nonprofit gets payments for a set period (say, 20 years). After that, the remaining assets go to your beneficiaries, often with major estate or gift tax breaks. CLTs are perfect for philanthropically minded families who want to reduce taxable estates while making an impact. Think of it as legacy planning with heart.
Distribution Provisions (Principal & Income)
Ever read a trust document and felt lost in the legalese? You’re not alone. Distribution provisions dictate when and how beneficiaries get payouts, whether it’s for education, health needs, or hitting a certain age. The key? Clarity. Vague language can lead to disputes or unintended tax consequences. If you’re unsure, get a pro to review it. This is because a well-drafted trust should work like a Swiss watch, smoothly executing your wishes.
65-Day Rule for Trust Distributions
Timing is everything in trusts estate planning. The 65-day rule lets a trust or estate make a distribution in the first 65 days of the new year but count it for the prior year’s taxes.
Why does this matter? It’s a flexibility tool, helping manage tax bills or optimize beneficiary payouts. Just make sure you file the right forms (Schedule K-1, Form 1041) and consult a tax pro to avoid costly mistakes.
Revocable Trust (Living Trust)
Let’s be real: nobody wants their family stuck in probate court for a year while some judge decides who gets what. That’s where a revocable trust (aka “living trust”) comes in. It’s like a will, but without the court drama, making it a cornerstone of trusts estate planning. Tax catch? No upfront breaks. But here’s the play: You can tweak it while you’re alive (hence “revocable”), and if you’re smart, you’ll bake in capital gains tricks or estate tax loopholes. Just remember, tax laws change, and so should your trust. Otherwise, it’s just an expensive binder full of outdated jargon.
Sales to Grantor Trusts
Here’s a slick trust and estate planning move: Sell assets (like real estate or stocks) to an irrevocable grantor trust. The trust pays you via a promissory note, and here’s the beauty. You still handle the taxes because the IRS sees you and the trust as one entity. Why bother? Because this lets you freeze asset values for tax purposes, use your lifetime gift tax exemption, and keep some control over the assets. It’s a next-level strategy for wealthy families looking to transfer wealth efficiently.
Gift Trusts (Crummey Trusts & ILITs)
Gifting assets to your kids or grandkids? Gift trusts (like Crummey trusts or Irrevocable Life Insurance Trusts (ILITs)) let you leverage annual gift tax exclusions while keeping some strings attached, ensuring seamless trust and estate planning.
The strategy? Fund the trust with assets (or life insurance), and beneficiaries get limited withdrawal rights. Done right, you shrink your taxable estate and maximize exemptions. But tread carefully: one misstep with IRS rules, and those tax benefits vanish.
Gifting Stock to Kids (Tuition Strategy)
Want to help pay for your child’s college? Gifting appreciated stock can be smarter than cash. If your kid sells the shares (and they’re in a lower tax bracket), they might pay little to no capital gains tax, versus the 20%+ you’d owe.
But beware the “kiddie tax” if they’re under 24. For maximum tax efficiency, pair this with a trust and estate planning strategy like a 529 plan or UGMA account.
More About Evans Sternau CPA
Our core values are proactiveness, responsiveness, and support – they help us ensure that we continue to serve each and every one of our clients to the highest level possible
- Proactiveness: Tax, accounting, and advisory isn’t just about solving problems when they arise – Evans Sternau CPA implements better solutions and performs routine checks year-round.
- Responsiveness: Keeping all parties informed, always, means everyone is operating with full awareness and to the fullest extent.
- Support: Whatever your tax, advisory, and accounting needs are, Evans Sternau CPA guarantees that we make each and every one of our clients feel supported when they work with us.
Ready to work with a Proactive CPA?
Here’s the hard truth: most trust and estate planning strategies fail not because of bad intentions, but because they’re reactive and often drafted in a hurry when it’s already too late. At Evans Sternau CPA, we don’t wait for problems to find you.
Let’s talk about where you are, what you’ve built, and how to make it last. Reach out today to schedule a confidential consultation with one of our trust and estate planning professionals.
