UNDERWRITEEvery dollar above $13.61M is exposed to a 40% federal levy.
The federal estate tax exemption is $13.61M per individual in 2026 — scheduled to sunset to approximately $7M in 2026 under the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act expiration. Seventeen states impose additional estate taxes with thresholds as low as $1M. Without structural intervention, your heirs write a check to the IRS before they receive a cent.
TCJA Sunset Warning: The doubled exemption expires December 31, 2025. Estates between $7M–$13.6M that are not currently exposed will become exposed. ILITs funded before the sunset date lock in current exemption treatment.
Properly funded, the death benefit never enters your estate. Period.
Under IRC §2042, proceeds from a life insurance policy are included in the gross estate only if the decedent possessed incidents of ownership at death. When an irrevocable trust is the owner and beneficiary of record — and the grantor never retained any incident — the proceeds bypass the gross estate entirely.
Three-Year Lookback Rule Managed
Transfers of existing policies to an ILIT are subject to IRC §2035. We structure new policy acquisitions directly by the trust to eliminate lookback exposure.
Incidents of Ownership Eliminated
The trust instrument prohibits the grantor from changing beneficiaries, borrowing against the policy, or exercising any right that constitutes an incident of ownership.
Split-Dollar Arrangements Documented
Where premium financing is required, we structure compliant split-dollar arrangements under the 2003 final regulations to avoid phantom income inclusion.
Five exposed flanks. Five engineered solutions.
Every provision in an Underwrite trust instrument exists to close a specific gap the IRS exploits. Nothing is boilerplate. Nothing is left to chance.
Crummey Letter Automation
Without documented withdrawal rights, annual premium gifts fail the §2503(b) annual exclusion — the IRS reclassifies them as taxable gifts.
We automate Crummey notice delivery to all trust beneficiaries within 72 hours of each premium gift, maintaining a documented 30-day withdrawal window. Annual exclusion preserved: $18,000 per beneficiary per year.
Trustee Succession Architecture
An ILIT with no successor trustee provision faces court intervention on the grantor's death — freezing distributions to beneficiaries for 12–18 months during probate.
Every trust instrument includes a three-tier trustee succession chain: independent institutional trustee, named individual successor, and a trust protector with power to appoint replacement trustees without court approval.
Generation-Skipping Transfer Provisions
ILITs distributing to grandchildren trigger the GST tax at 40% unless an exemption allocation is made on a timely-filed gift tax return.
GST exemption allocation is made on Form 709 in the year of each premium gift. Dynasty trust provisions extend the trust's tax efficiency across three generations without additional transfer tax events.
The counsel who refers most trusts here once said: "Nothing was left to chance."
Every ILIT I've referred to Underwrite has been structured without a single technical deficiency. The Crummey documentation alone has saved my clients from three IRS audit challenges.
When Form 706 projections hit $22M, the conversation always turns to the ILIT. Underwrite delivers a trust instrument that holds up — the kind of structural certainty that lets me sign the return with confidence.
The cross-purchase agreement we funded through Underwrite's ILIT structure was the cleanest transfer-for-value solution I've seen in 20 years of business succession work.