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Estate Planners Ponder Their Profession’ s Future At Heckerling
With only about 200,000 Americans facing a federal estate tax, wealth advisors face a new landscape. By Joseph B. Darby III
THE HECKERLING INSTITUTE HOSTS the premier U. S. conference on estate planning and wealth management matters every January in Florida— and it’ s a boatload of fun.
It’ s the perfect midwinter opportunity to catch up on the latest trends in estate planning and wealth management, swap your best ideas for some even better ideas, eat too much and drink what we’ ll call just the exact right amount while enjoying a convivial discussion with friends old and new. That said, the attitudes at the 2026 conference were more puzzling and ambivalent than usual. Lots of smart people were trying to figure out the next direction in their professional lives after an upheaval in the law— and their business.
Simply put, U. S. federal estate planning has changed both dramatically and permanently( or at least, as one wag put it, until Congress reconvenes) thanks to the One Big Beautiful Bill Act signed into law on July 4, 2025. It’ s not yet entirely clear what the industry is going to become after the law’ s enactment.
Effective January 1, 2026, the lifetime unified gift and estate tax credit is now set at the equivalent of $ 15 million per taxpayer( effectively $ 30 million for a married couple), numbers that in the future will be indexed to inflation. This means the overwhelming majority of U. S. taxpayers no longer need creative or aggressive tax planning for their federal estate tax liabilities. The estimates differ, but experts count the number of U. S. families with greater than $ 30 million in total assets at somewhere between 0.25 % and 0.4 %, and maybe as high as 0.7 %. It’ s probably only around 200,000 families.
Nevertheless, even without the past tax worries or an overarching theme, the Heckerling show must go on. There may not be much of a federal estate tax left for most people, but death is still around.
And with that as a background, the Heckerling conference offered up an array of surprisingly interesting and attention-grabbing topics to discuss over wine.
1. U. S. Trust Law Is Deconstructing
Trust law, once upon a time, was stodgy and conservative. The jurisprudence varied moderately from state to state, but it was often based on fundamentally similar concepts and unifying theories.
Well, times have changed: Over the last 25 years, U. S. trust law has undergone a major transformation, evolving from something relatively uniform into a highly fragmented system— and even a competitive one where“ trust-friendly” states vie for trust business in a kind of beauty contest. Some states, notably South Dakota, Nevada, Delaware, Alaska and Wyoming, have tailored their laws to offer superior tax advantages for trusts, as well as en-
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