We paid a little less than that for a Revocable Family Trust with all the bess and whistles. This is near Boston, medium size Town.
Hello all. After dragging my feet for years I have finally got around to getting estate plan in order. I had a consultation with a reputable local attorney and liked him and his suggestions. What I very much did not like was the price quote! Seems outrageous to me but I know very little about these things. Hoping to get a sanity check on a few things to see if it is indeed too steep or is this just reality.
1) Important to the context of the plan, we live in Illinois which has an individual estate tax exemption of $4mm. Our current assets including term life insurance coverage exceeds this. I was surprised but he insisted that the term life insurance coverage would be scoped into the estate value for tax purposes (I always thought life insurance payouts were not subject to taxes). The lawyer insisted that we each need our own trust so that if spouse 1 were to die, the transfer of the assets to the trust would maintain the $4mm in IL estate tax exemption. If the assets were to transfer to spouse 2 rather than spouse 1's trust, spouse 2 now only has a $4mm exemption instead of the $8mm combined. I have researched this and it seems to check out but the need for two individual trusts was more complex than I expected.
2) The quote was $4,800! I was expecting maybe half of that. I imagine it might be driven by the need to establish two trusts and transfer title of the house to the two trusts but I was a bit taken aback. Online search seems to quote $1k-$3k as an average for a trust so the fact that I am being told $5k doesn't feel great. That said, I thought this guy seemed really good and non salesy (other than the price!)
Hoping to see if anyone has a view on the proposed structure given the IL tax situation and the quote. Thank you!
Statistics: Posted by PinotGris — Tue Aug 06, 2024 11:06 am — Replies 30 — Views 3441