Mini Drilldown

It happens pretty often that we find ourselves at a social gathering, and in talking about ourselves, we talk about our professional life. When you’re part of a firm like The Unger Company, you sometimes take for granted that people will understand the terminology that we use in our work life. We realize that this isn’t always the case, so we are doing a series of “what the heck is” topics in our Mini Drilldown to let visitors to our website learn about these terms.

New Jersey is nicknamed the Garden State, and its garden has grown a doozy of a death tax! New Jersey is one of five states that applies only an inheritance tax on wealth transfer. The difference between an estate tax and an inheritance tax is that the estate tax is a tax on wealth transfer from an estate, while an inheritance tax is a transfer tax placed on the recipient of an estate distribution.

We occasionally bump into an understandable question: How does The Unger Company differ from a financial advisor? And, differ, we do! It’s not unreasonable for someone to wonder this. Our work with insurance products that are income producing can look an awful lot like some things a financial advisor would recommend and may have done at some point before you started thinking seriously about your estate and wealth transfer.

Massachusetts’ taunting nickname Taxachusetts is pretty well earned. There are many levels of taxation that hit taxpayers in the Bay State, including income tax, property tax, sales tax, and estate tax. And the list goes on. This makes it an expensive place to live, more so, an expensive place to die.

A “gross estate” is essentially an accounting of everything a person owns or has certain interests in at the time of their death. This is a fair market value, not necessarily the amount paid, and can include cash, securities, real estate, insurance, trusts, annuities, business interests, and other assets. Then the “taxable estate” is determined by subtracting deductions, such as mortgages and other outstanding debts, estate expenses, donations to charities, and property that passes to surviving spouses.

Financing large life insurance policies is a practice used by the high-net-worth individuals (HNWI) and ultra-high-net-worth individuals (UHNWI) The Unger Company has been serving successfully for nearly five decades.