With a Little Estate Planning, Your House Can Stay in the Family – New York Times
CAUTION: Reading this article may provoke self-inflicted slaps to the head and utterances of “Why didn’t I do this five years ago?”
In 1999, Farhad Aghdami, a trust lawyer in Richmond, Va., suggested to Jim and Yolonda Roberts that they put their home in a Qualified Personal Residence Trust to shelter it from looming estate taxes.
Piedmont Lodge, the Robertses’ white clapboard house with six portico columns sitting on 53 acres near Keswick, Va., was worth about $1.6 million back then. The trust lets them give the property to their four children for about a third of what it was valued at in 1999. The couple, now 75 years old, can live in the home for the 10-year term of the trust. When the trust expires in three years, the house belongs to the children.