Old Trusts and Corporations Need Review

It's ubiquitous.

It is almost a daily issue.

And that is that, of course, our clients, even the ones who have done dutiful planning in the past, have many, many tons of paper legal documents that are old and maybe not in the best shape, we'll say.

And I think that's a fair statement.

So I want to talk about two in particular or kind of two categories in particular that are the most troublesome from the perspective that things can change over time in the overall environment that applied to the people and the entities involved.

And it just necessitates a little rethink.

It doesn't mean that you're necessarily going to change something.

The necessity is in looking.

But again, it doesn't mean you're going to change anything.

And so I'm not necessarily, I'm not, I'm not saying, sorry, I've said necessary too many times.

So forgive me.

I'm not saying that old structures are bad.

That's not what I'm saying.

In fact, in some cases, old structures are very, very good and you would not want to do any changes at all.

And a good example of that would be grandfathered GST trust is basically pre-1986 GST trust.

They're grandfathered into the GST tax and you don't want to change them.

Or if you do, you want to do it very, very, very, very, very, very carefully because they're protected from the GST tax.

It's a freebie.

You don't have to worry about the GST tax for this.

So of course, that's an old structure.

You wouldn't want to make any changes.

Another one that doesn't even have to be that old, but you could have a C corporation that's existed and it's a type of company that could qualify for qualified their stock and it could qualify for qualified small business stock.

So you wouldn't want to go changing the structure because you could lose out on the benefits of qualified small business stock capital gains exclusion of some amount or all.

And so you'd want to be very careful.