Today I’m going to give you a quick primer about estate taxes.

Before we get into all the nitty gritty details and secrets and strategies, it might be nice if you know the basics.

So here we go.

First of all, if you are a Washington state resident (or own property in WA) you are technically subject to two estate taxes:

1. The Federal Estate Tax

2. The Washington State Estate Tax

Real quick, when people talk about death taxes or inheritance taxes or anything related to death, they are pretty much talking about the estate tax.

The way both taxes work is, there is a certain amount of assets you can have without having to owe any tax – this amount is exempted from the estate tax.

When we talk about exemptions, this is what I’m referring to.

The federal estate tax exemption right now is 12.2 million dollars.

The WA estate tax exemption right now is 2.193 million dollars.

Real quick, as an aside, if you are married, there are a couple of other estate tax perks.

First, for both estate taxes there is an unlimited exemption on transfers to a surviving spouse. Translation = if you give everything to your spouse when you die, there will be no tax due no matter your asset level (but the surviving spouse will owe when they die).

Second, for the federal estate tax only, when the first spouse dies you can give your estate tax exemption to your spouse. Translation = if you are married as long as you check the right box when the first spouse dies right now you have 24.2 million dollars of exemption.

Following with me so far?

Great!

And… maybe that’s enough for this post. It’s already getting kind of long.

Next we can talk about gifting. Yay!

Cheers.

Christopher Small

PS – if you want some nuts and bolts estate planning and probate info you can see all of it on my YouTube channel – http://www.youtube.com/c/CMSLawFirmLLC

PPS – I’ve started making some content on tik tok that’s pretty interesting too – a LOT of real questions from real people. You can find that here – https://www.tiktok.com/@estateplanattorney

And PPPS – if you need help with estate planning or probate the easiest thing to do is click the link and book a time to chat – https://cmslawfirm.com