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The erosion you can prevent, but can't reverse

Estate Taxes

Federal exemptions sunset. State thresholds sit far below the net worth that triggers them. The erosion starts long before the estate does.

If you live in Massachusetts, the estate tax starts at $2,000,000, not the federal exemption you read about. Add a business, appreciated property, large qualified balances, or a family structure that keeps evolving, and the exposure compounds quietly in the background while everything else gets attention.

Hold your wealth and keep control, and the taxable estate grows every year. Give it away early and the assets are gone, along with the flexibility. Most families are handed this as a binary and told to pick. It isn't a binary. It's a sequence.

The erosion has mechanics. Lifetime gift limits cap what moves during life. Estate tax takes its share at death. Transfers made without structured valuation move at full price when they could have moved at a discount. Each unmanaged year is a transfer that happened at the wrong terms.

And the windows are finite. The lifetime exemption is a use-it-or-lose-it number with a sunset attached. State laws change. Valuation discount opportunities close when the structure isn't in place before the event that needed it.

Estate tax is not a death problem. It is a net worth problem, paid over time, in moves you make and moves you fail to make.
Eric Cooper, Founder

Why this doesn't solve in isolation

A trust drafted in a vacuum solves the lawyer's problem. Your estate exposure lives inside your retirement accounts, your gains, and your exit.

Retirement Taxes

Qualified money compounds inside the estate and passes with the tax bill attached. Roth conversion cadence is estate work as much as income work.

Capital Gains

Basis step-up at death versus gifting during life decides which assets should move now and which should never move at all.

Liquidity Event

The years after an exit are the widest gifting window most families ever see, if the structures exist before the wire hits.

Sooner's approach

Estate work at Sooner is a cadence, not a signing ceremony. The documents matter, but the value is in the ongoing decisions: what to gift, what to hold, what to convert, what to discount, all revisited as law, net worth, and family change.

We hold both sides of the tension explicitly. Preservation strategies are weighed against the control and lifestyle you're giving up to get them, so you never wake up wealthy on paper and boxed in, in practice.

The work runs alongside your estate attorney, valuation specialists, and trust counsel. Based in New England, we spend a lot of time in high-state-estate-tax terrain, Massachusetts included.

The cost of waiting

Erosion is the operative word. Every year of unused exemption is transfer capacity that expires. Every unstructured transfer moves at full valuation. Every closed window stays closed.

You can prevent what's ahead. You cannot reverse what's behind.

Ninety seconds tells you where to start.

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