Estate Planning
Estate planning isn’t about death. It’s about direction. It’s about making decisions now that protect your family, preserve your wealth, and keep your legacy from being defined by courts, taxes, or conflict. At Cinder Wealth, we help business owners use their time wisely so they have options, not just obligations.
Estate Tax Strategies
The federal estate tax exemption is $13.61 million per individual or $27.22 million per married couple in 2025. But that exemption is scheduled to sunset at the end of 2025 and cut roughly in half unless new legislation is passed. Anything above the exemption is taxed at a flat 40% federal estate tax rate.
Here’s the good news. For most business owners, estate tax is optional if you plan early. Through gifting strategies, trust structures, and coordination with your business planning, it’s often possible to eliminate estate taxes entirely.
One of the most powerful strategies we use is squeeze and freeze. Basically, you squeeze down the value of your business through various discounting techniques, then freeze it by putting it inside an irrevocable trust. All that growth in the business when you sell it three years later happens outside of your estate. You
could pay zero estate taxes on that growth. But this only works if you have time. Six months out, we break the IRS timelines and there’s not much we can do.
Trust Planning and Wealth Transfer
We use advanced trust strategies like GRATs, SLATs, and IDGTs to help clients transfer wealth during their lifetime without triggering gift or estate taxes. One strategy we often use with business owners is setting up a trust and selling assets to it in exchange for a promissory note. This removes future appreciation from your estate, and if structured properly through an intentionally defective grantor trust, the sale doesn’t trigger capital gains. If you need liquidity, you can borrow funds back from the trust. The interest payments flow within your planning structure and provide tax-efficient access to capital.
We also use lifetime gifting to move wealth out of your estate tax-free. You and your spouse could each gift $18,000 to someone and each of you could also gift $18,000 to their spouse. That’s $72,000 per year moving out of your estate without touching your lifetime exemption.
Multi-Generational Planning
At Cinder Wealth, we use a Vision and Values Workshop with every planning client. It’s a foundational step that helps uncover what matters most to your family beyond just the numbers. Through guided questions around family, business, philanthropy, and life experience, we help clients articulate the virtues they want to pass down, not just the valuables. This gives us clear guidance to align your estate and financial plans with your actual values and equips you to share and teach those values to the next generation.
The goal isn’t just to avoid taxes. It’s to preserve what you’ve built for the people and causes you care about.
Is your estate plan protecting your family and your business, or are you hoping it all just works out?
Let’s Protect Your Legacy
Schedule a conversation. We’ll review your estate exposure, discuss your options, and build a plan that gives you control over your legacy.