Pass Down the Assets. Not the Tax Bill.

Estate tax planning is the work of arranging what you own — and how it transfers — so your heirs receive assets instead of tax bills. At Taxstra, we handle the tax engine of that plan: modeling your federal and state estate tax exposure, designing a gifting strategy, mapping which assets should be held for a basis step-up, and making sure there is cash available to pay any tax without a forced sale.

To be clear about scope: we are CPAs, not attorneys. We do not draft wills or trusts. Your estate attorney handles the legal documents; we make sure the numbers behind those documents are right, the tax filings get done, and the strategy stays current as your assets and the law change. Most estate plans fail at exactly that seam — the trust exists, but the beneficiary designations, account titling, and tax projections were never aligned with it.

A typical engagement covers estate and gift exemption modeling, an annual gifting schedule, a basis map of your assets, liquidity planning, charitable strategy, business succession coordination, and a review of beneficiary designations and titling against the plan.

For 2026, the federal estate and gift tax exemption is $15 million per person — $30 million for a married couple — with amounts above that taxed at rates up to 40%. At those levels, most families assume estate tax planning is someone else's problem. Three things make that assumption risky.

First, the exemption is a political number. Congress has changed it repeatedly over the past two decades, and nothing prevents a future Congress from lowering it again. A plan built only for today's exemption has no margin for the law moving.

Second, state estate taxes start much lower. Illinois taxes estates above $4 million. A family nowhere near the federal exemption can still face a six-figure state estate tax bill — more on that below.

Third, estates grow. A $6 million estate compounding at 7% roughly doubles in a decade. The right question isn't whether you owe estate tax today; it's whether your projected estate, at projected exemption levels, creates exposure your heirs would have to pay in cash within months of your death.

Assets you hold until death generally receive a step-up in basis: your heirs' cost basis resets to the asset's value at your death, and the capital gain that built up during your lifetime is never taxed. Assets you give away during life generally carry your original basis to the recipient — the gain travels with the gift.

Here's what that means in dollars. Say you bought stock for $100,000 that is now worth $1,000,000, and you want it to end up with your daughter.

• Gift it today: she takes your $100,000 basis. When she sells at $1,000,000, she recognizes a $900,000 gain — roughly $214,000 of federal tax at the 20% top capital gains rate plus the 3.8% net investment income tax, before any state tax.
• Leave it to her at death: her basis steps up to $1,000,000. She can sell the next day with essentially no federal capital gains tax.

Same stock, same daughter, roughly $214,000 of difference — driven entirely by sequencing. This is why reflexive gifting of appreciated assets is the most common expensive mistake we see in estates under the federal exemption: the family avoids an estate tax it was never going to owe, and buys a capital gains bill instead.

For 2026, you can give up to $19,000 per recipient per year — $38,000 for a married couple giving together — with no gift tax, no use of your lifetime exemption, and no gift tax return required. The exclusion applies per recipient, with no limit on the number of recipients. Used consistently, it quietly moves serious money out of a taxable estate.

Worked example: a married couple gives the annual exclusion amount to their three adult children, the children's three spouses, and four grandchildren — ten recipients. That's $380,000 per year leaving the estate with zero tax cost and zero paperwork. Over ten years, that's $3.8 million removed, plus every dollar of growth those assets would have produced inside the estate. For an Illinois family hovering near the $4 million state exclusion, a program like this can be the difference between a state estate tax bill and none.

Gifts above the annual exclusion aren't taxed immediately either — they simply use lifetime exemption and require a Form 709 gift tax return. For large estates, deliberately spending exemption during life can be the right call, because all future growth on the gifted assets escapes the estate entirely.

Trusts and family entities are where estate planning gets sold hard and explained badly. Our job is to model what each structure does to your taxes — estate, gift, income, and basis — so the conversation with your attorney starts from numbers instead of vocabulary.

• Revocable living trust: avoids probate and keeps you in control, but it is not an estate tax strategy by itself — assets in it remain fully in your taxable estate.
• Irrevocable life insurance trust (ILIT): keeps life insurance proceeds out of the taxable estate and creates liquidity to pay estate tax without selling the practice, the building, or the rentals.
• Charitable remainder trust (CRT): converts an appreciated asset into a lifetime income stream with an upfront charitable deduction and deferral of the capital gain. Full breakdown on our CRT strategy page.
• Charitable lead trust (CLT): the mirror image — a charity receives payments for a term, and what remains passes to heirs at a reduced transfer tax cost. See our CLT strategy page.
• Family limited partnership (FLP): consolidates family assets — often real estate — under centralized management and may support valuation discounts on transferred interests. Details and risks on our FLP strategy page.

For business owners, the same modeling extends to succession: who buys the company or the building, with what money, and at what tax cost. Liquidity is the quiet killer in estates heavy on real estate or a closely held business — the tax can be due in cash while the wealth is locked in assets nobody should have to sell quickly.

Illinois imposes its own estate tax with a $4 million exclusion and graduated rates reaching 16%. Three features make it nastier than it sounds. The exclusion is not portable between spouses — a couple can't simply combine to $8 million the way the federal rules allow. The computation behaves more like a cliff than a deduction, so estates modestly over $4 million owe disproportionately large amounts. And $4 million arrives faster than people think once you add a house, retirement accounts, a brokerage account, and life insurance death benefits.

Composite example: an Illinois widow dies with a $7 million estate. Federal estate tax: zero — she's far under the federal exemption. Illinois estate tax: several hundred thousand dollars, due in cash, on an estate her family assumed was "under the limit." Had her spouse's plan funded a credit-shelter trust at the first death, each spouse's $4 million Illinois exclusion could have been put to work, dramatically shrinking or eliminating the state bill.

The planning levers are real: credit-shelter trust structures at the first spouse's death, lifetime gifting (Illinois has no gift tax, so completed gifts generally leave the Illinois estate tax base), charitable strategy, and — for some clients — residency planning, since many states impose no estate tax at all. Multi-state estates add another layer: out-of-state real estate can pull a second state's rules into the plan, which is exactly the kind of problem our multi-state tax practice works on daily.

• CPA + MBA + licensed real estate broker. Founder Bryan Martin's credentials matter here: estates heavy on rental property need someone fluent in basis, depreciation recapture, and what properties actually trade for — not just trust vocabulary.
• A proactive planning firm. Estate tax planning is multi-year by nature — gifting schedules, exemption usage, basis tracking. That's already how we work: quantified strategy engagements, not a once-a-year filing relationship.
• Genuine multi-state expertise. State estate taxes, residency, and out-of-state property drive estate outcomes. Multi-state work is a daily part of our practice, not an occasional headache.
• Established and nationwide. Roughly 1,500 clients across all 50 states, fully remote, with a modern client portal — so your attorney, your advisor, and your CPA can work from the same numbers.
• We coordinate, we don't compete. We work alongside your estate attorney and financial advisor. The tax model we build becomes the shared blueprint everyone executes against.