As an investment or business advisor, Certified Financial Planner, Realtor or other financial expert, your clients come to you for advice, counsel and strategies that will help them accumulate wealth. Unfortunately, this very wealth accumulation could come back to haunt them and their families when they die.
It’s called the estate tax, and the federal government, plus 11 states and the District of Columbia, levy these taxes on high-value probate estates. Consequently, your clients need a comprehensive estate plan that helps them avoid probate and therefore reduces their estate tax exposure.
The problem is, you can’t currently provide estate planning services to your clients because you’re not a licensed attorney. What to do?
AmeriEstate Partnership
Becoming a business partner of AmeriEstate Legal Plan, Inc. solves your dilemma. We are the country’s leading estate plan providers, and since our inception in 1998, our network of deeply experienced attorneys and other estate planning professionals have helped over 40,000 families keep and protect what’s theirs. We’re fully prepared to help your clients, too, by becoming your estate planning “back office” when you partner with us.
Federal Estate Tax
Before getting into the many benefits of partnering with AmeriEstate, let’s take a closer look at the estate tax.
At the federal level, your clients could face an estate tax of 18% to 40% depending on the value of their probate estate at the time of their death.
True, there’s an exemption to the federal estate tax. In 2022, it amounts to $11.2 million for an individual and $22.4 million for a married couple. Nevertheless, given that the estate tax is based on the current fair market value of your clients’ assets, not the amount they originally paid for them, your wealthier clients could easily have estates that exceed this threshold.
In addition, the current exemption is set to expire in 2026 without Congressional intervention, at which point it will go back to the pre-2018 level of $5.9 million for an individual and $11.8 million for a married couple.
State Estate Taxes
As mentioned, 11 states and the District of Columbia levy their own estate taxes, all of which have considerably lower exclusion amounts than the federal tax. For instance, Massachusetts levies a tax of up to 16% on probate estates valued at over $1 million. Oregon likewise sets the threshold at $1 million, and taxes probate estates that exceed this amount up to 16%.
You and AmeriEstate Working Together
Obviously, your clients need estate planning help, and they need it now. Becoming an AmeriEstate Business Partner allows you to refer them to your trusted partner so they can get this help. You can rest assured that we will give your clients the same level of care that you do.
An AmeriEstate business partnership benefits you as well as your clients. For example, it lets you do the following:
- Develop a stronger relationship with your existing clients
- Market to a wider class of potential clients
- Increase your business’s profits
- Do well while doing good
Ready to Get Started?
Contact AmeriEstate Legal Plan, Inc. today. John Knickerbocker, our Senior Manager for Business Development, will be happy to answer all your questions.
