YOUR FAMILY BUSINESS AND YOUR ESTATE

As Penn State professor William Rothwell ominously points out in the forward to Exit Right: A Guided Tour of Succession Planning for Families in Business Together, more than 40% of the people who run the closely held operations that comprise 80% of the North American economy will retire by 2007. Those businesses will either be sold to a third party or management team, closed down, or passed on to the next generation. In this article I will focus on passing the business on to the next generation. Tax laws still favor home ownership with mortgage interest as a tax-deductible expense. The government has also encouraged the passing of a business from one generation to the next with several favorable estate and gift tax rulings. Estate planning attorneys have utilized IRS ruling 5960 to minimize the estate and gift tax owed for a business either gifted to or inherited by the next generation. The business is often placed in one or more LLC