After years of flux, the federal estate, gift and
generation-skipping transfer (GST) tax laws have finally settled
into a "permanent" state. With the enactment of the
American Taxpayer Relief Act of 2012 (ATRA) as of January 2013, for
the first time in over a decade, the federal estate tax statutes do
not have built-in expiration dates and the uncertainty that came
with the scheduled changes.
Now that the $5,250,000 federal estate, gift and GST tax
exemptions are permanent and will continue to increase based on
automatic annual inflation adjustments, the decision-making process
for making significant gifts has changed for many individuals. The
"use it or lose it" atmosphere that influenced planning
decisions to capture larger exemptions (and thus accelerated the
gifting process for many individuals) is gone.
