A Sunsetting "Death Tax"
One of the biggest challenges in agriculture includes constantly changing laws and regulations including one piece of the tax picture not-so-affectionately known as the “Death Tax.” It has always been a bit of a moving target and, in talking to CPA Britney Tempel, it sounds like adjusting sites could again be in order…“Right now, in 2024, you can have an individual lifetime limit that’s about $13.6 million. What that means is if I am an individual, I have the ability to pass away with $13.6 million dollars of assets or less, and I can either choose to give away some of those during my lifetime or at death. But as long as what I own is less than that, I don’t have to worry about an estate tax. My family can do the normal process of figuring out where my assets go, but they don’t have to worry about paying taxes on that. That’s going to sunset. And, right now, the question is what limit do we go back to and that’s not yet defined. But the industry’s kind of projecting that it’ll fall between six and seven million, so we’re roughly going to lose half of that exclusion.”
And when will we know what’s really going to happen after 2025? Well that, my friends, is up to the next President and Congress.