FARM SUCCESSION PLANNING

Estate planning is important for all families and business owners, but it is crucial for farmers. It takes someone who understands farming, and the law, to give you the best legal representation when structuring your farm succession plan. This is the goal of the estate planning attorneys at Dobbs & Folz, LLC.

We will sit down with you and wade through the complex legal, tax and related issues associated with farm succession planning. Our goal is to provide you with the best solutions, including:

• Minimizing death taxes.
• Leaving your children’s inheritance in a Trust, or creating an LLC to achieve goals of keeping the farm within the family.
• Creating the mechanisms to maximize the benefits of the law that allows decedents to pass $5.25 million of assets free from estate and generation skipping taxes, and married couples to pass $10.5 million. We caution farmers to get accurate estimates on the current value of their holdings, since the value of farms continue to be on the rise.
• Treating all children fairly – but not necessarily equally. This might include implementing a plan that allows the child who is managing the farm to have control of day-to-day decisions, and be provided with a reasonable salary for services rendered, while dividing net profits equally among all the children.
• Implementing a customized farm succession plan that meets the specific needs of each farm family. For example, we might recommend doing some gifting during the farm owner’s lifetime in order to reduce the size of the taxable estate at death. In other circumstances, lifetime gifting might not be advisable.