Rebecca MacGregor

LIFETIME PLANNING 

Designing a real estate investor’s plan to reduce taxes

A commercial real estate property investor benefited from Rebecca’s creativity to achieve his goals. Each of his commercial and residential properties are owned by separate LLCs, which are owned by a Family Holding LLC, which is owned 50% by his revocable trust and 50% by his spouse’s revocable trust. This design results in multiple estate and gift tax discounts because the various LLC agreements provide for lack of marketability and/or a minority interest discounts. 

Due to uncertainty over future tax law, the client is taking advantage of gifting the differential in the estate tax lifetime exemption amount before it sunsets in 2025 or is changed sooner by Congress, leaving approximately $6M as the differential to gift now from each of their revocable trusts to each other’s spousal lifetime access irrevocable trusts. 

Helping professors reduce taxes and preserve wealth

Several professors from respected colleges and universities rely on Rebecca for estate planning. This representation typically includes designing and implementing an estate plan for incapacity planning, wealth transfer, and reduction in estate, gift, and income taxes. 

Many professors wish to give back in a tax efficient manner. For one client, Rebecca drafted charitable remainder annuity trusts to make an irrevocable gift of appreciated assets to the trust, which then sells the assets, and reinvests the proceeds into a diversified brokerage account. Because the client donated the appreciated assets, she did not pay capital gains on the sale. In addition, in the year of the gift, she took an income tax deduction for the present value of the remainder interest of the trust. During the client’s lifetime, the trust distributes guaranteed fixed payments to her, then upon her death the remainder of the trust property is distributed to the university. 

Ever the inquisitive group, Rebecca believes that professors like working with her because she “does well at answering their questions as to why she recommends one strategy over another.” 

POST-DEATH ADMINISTRATION 

Failed trust with no beneficiary 

We petitioned the probate court to determine the heirs of the grantor of the trust, as of the date of the last-named beneficiary’s death. After submitting a memorandum explaining the applicable laws and the various percentages for each heir by generation, the court issued a decree allowing our petition. The case was so intricate that it took the court three years to issue a ruling.   

Complicated estate involving LLCs, many real estate investments, and more 

A client engaged us to administer his deceased friend’s complicated estate. The decedent was a real estate investor and had multiple attorneys working on his matters, but none of them had coordinated with each other, and none of the trusts or entities connected to create a plan. We filed the probate administration with the court to gather the decedent’s assets held in his individual name, transferred his ownership interests from the probate estate to his trust, transferred the membership interests of the limited liability companies to his trust, and updated the manager of all the limited liability companies. After we completed all of these steps, the trust was the underlying owner of all of decedent’s assets and the friend was the fiduciary in charge of managing all the assets for the benefit of decedent’s special needs son.