Estate taxes

The only time they are taxes on your earnings (if I'm even understanding this correctly) is if something you are leaving to somebody has appreciated in value. So if you bought your house for $100k and it is now worth $400k, the increase in the value of the house can be taxed just like it could if you sold it.

I still think a person should be able to give an unencumbered gift!

Mixed feelings...
If I have to pay those taxes if I sell the house, why shouldn't I have to pay them if I die?

Remember the max. limits, for the most part many estate taxes do not bankrupt the estate. It is the idea that you object to not the actual tax, that is what I think.

If the kids have to sell the house to pay for the capital gains, I guess I can live with that. But if somebody comes in and says I can't leave Aunt Maude's necklace to my daughter

Excellent point!

have some cheesecake and a tylenol!

yum thanks hun and save some for yourself as well.

Oh' you need a good ole' hot bowl of Chilli first! Better yet do the Chilli with a Philly Cheesteak and then the Cheesecake... Yum!

Hey, I said estate taxes, not steak taxes!!!

OMG great white now I am hungry!

me too, I want cheese!

Did I do that???

I have to ask...you're passing out cheesecake now?

Did you run out of brownies?

Our friend from Nottingham expressed a preference for cheesecake, but I have a few brownies here too...

International law is above the Law of the United States is above the Law of the State is above the Law of the County, is above the law of the local municipality...

Now which law contradicts the other?

Dawn's law?

Good one Dawn...

"International law is above the Law of the United States is above the Law of the State is above the Law of the County, is above the law of the local municipality"

Nothing related to the thread, but this statement jumped out at me....In most cases, state law is along side of federal law, not beneath it, and in many cases, above it, the states are not subserviant to the federal government except in very limited areas defined by the constitution. Municpal law is the same way in context of the states, not subserviant but paralel.
International law is symbolic actually, and no international law is above our own nations laws or constitution applied on our own soil.

technically correct, but Dawn's law usually trumps all in my household!

lol, yeh, that went with out saying, I always said to my kids that the republic ends at my doorstep, once inside it was a dictatorship.

International law is about to trump our federal law...in December the president will sign the UN Climate Treaty which will effectively do away with our national sovereignty. We've elected a man who doesn't respect our highest law. So don't worry about those estate taxes Dawn...cause there will be NO estate left to leave the kids, all your money will go to pay for your carbon footprint.

One of the sites I Googled claimed that hardly any farms ever had to be sold to pay estate taxes. I don't pretend to know if any of these FAQs are true or not though:

http://www.cbpp.org/files/estatetaxmyths.pdf

But I agree that we need to protect our farms and our farmers and not become any more dependent on foreign agriculture than we already are. I suspect there are much greater threats to farms than estate taxes. Urban sprawl, food prices, weather and water issues, etc....

How complicated have we made farming, and the ability to become a farmer is dependent on your ability to acquire that all holy land that is much more profitable as a parking lot for worship than to grow a crop that can easily be lost due to any number of conditions.

Talk about a big gamble, or so it seems to my mind.

Oh' by the by, Dawn you know that you can make your link active if you put the link in with one space between your last punctuation and one space behind the link, not two and don't use a return or the link becomes a dead link just like the one above.

Just sayin':)

I knew there was a trick to making the durn link active, but I just don't have the patience to remember. Bad Dawn...

practice makes perfect, patience has little to do with knowing and instilling that knowledge as a memory...

I hope I can help and I don't mind helping you or others to remember. I like sharing... I think that is my point to the answers in your discussion.

OK fine: http://www.cbpp.org/files/estatetaxmyths.pdf testing...

Cool, pretty blue link, very nice... Cool blue link of persuasion... Wow! look at the pretty color, do you think I've O.D.'d on the internet???

Being silly Gary, heeheheeeehee

I've read those facts but they make no sense whatsoever to me.
I am in position of partial ownership of 5000 acres of farm ground. If my husband and I die today; the going price of selling our land is about $500 an acre....
At 500 an acre times 5000 our kids would pay through the nose. The gross profit of this land would be 2.5 mil.
So how do they arrive at those figures? Until we quit farming a few years ago we were an average size farm. And you also have to figure in what we owe the bank, the fertilizer companies, and the other implement dealers etc......it's not as simple as all that.

I think people have a misunderstanding of farm life. We do own a lot of assets. We also have huge bills to pay.
Our interest on farm ground alone is $57,000 a year....no principle...just interest.
And we are in a good loan too!
I think that if I was a real estate tycoon it would be a different story but the fact is that farming also has a lot of other bills too.
And if my kids had to cough up 55% which is what they are going to go to if something isn't done then all the profits will go to other people like uncle sam and the bank.

I have to plead total ignorance about farming. But like anything else, if your bills are too high compared to your income, you're in trouble.

Well even if we had no bills to speak of and owned the ground outright; the 2.5 million that would be our sales; over half would go to Uncle Sam......that doesn't seem very fair.....

Not very. Maybe if you bought it for $50,000 and had capital gains of $2,500,000....

A living trust is a way to avoid some of that.

Oh yeah, I forgot that one too. Still the government or whoever it is needs to leave estate tax to the birds. I bet they don't pay that when something got passed on to them. Have a great day and keep smiling.

You probably have a problem with our entire system of government then, since I'm pretty sure it is the rich who are really running it!

Hmmm? Who is running our government? Looks at list of names and how much of the wealth that each one controls... Hmmmm? Who is the poorest person either in the Senate or the House of Representatives and how does their wealth compare to the average American???

Sounds like a quest for knowledge... How poor is poor? What actually constitutes a person as poor?

Wealth and accumulated assets clearly define who is Elite...

Me? A problem with and for our Government? You don't think, really do ya? Why would I be a problem? Oh' I know, I have this story to share... Did you hear the latest???

I have the hope for change to help the poor get back on their feet, in order to stop the corruption in the system. Did you see what happened to me???

Yeah I saw. Though I'm not sure your case had so much to do with the rich running the government as maybe runaway ego in the legal system. I could be way off base here though...

I think there is a combination of ego and wealth... Look at who the players are and how I was the hard working one in the whole group... I work hard for less than what the others acquire.

So yes, both ego and wealth... But what about the missing letters? Now there is a mystery... The court has yet to return my call, I wonder why? I guess I'll have to call again...

One missing letter, not so strange. Two, hmmm... Three? Very, very conspiracy-like...

I'm sure you're right about that. The poor don't leave enough to be taxed, so those of us in the middle are the ones who end up paying estate taxes.

Exactly right. That's how the system works.

Same question I posed up above...

If I have to pay a capital gains tax on the sale of my house, why should my estate not have to pay capital gains on the same house?

But in general, I agree with you...

There is a caveat and that is what will keep a nation strong? What will make a nation stronger?

It comes off and is a redistribution of wealth at that it is only a percentage of wealth, and at the same time there are other things to consider...

one is how the wealth was acquired... You have capital gains on a growth of assets or you have a sudden gain such as winning the lottery how should each type of gain be taxed and at what rate?

I could open up a whole new can of worms on this one...:)

better yet, start your own discussion on the topic!:-)

I could do that... But yours is more fun...

i will tell u if i have any wealth when i die which is debatable i got it from working my a$$ off all my life & i don't think i owe the goverment any of it.

Not that much softer sometimes!

Well, sometimes, if it involve other countries and capital investments and oil and such, but most of the times they simply send you a letter whilst the mafia will send you a horse head on a pillow.

I was thinking the mafia broke your knee caps to start and the government throws you in prison. Some governments are probably just as nasty as the mafia though.

Thanks for not clobbering me!:-)