Estate tax closing letters: fee rises October 26, 2026
The IRS estate tax closing letter fee rises from $56 to $76 on October 26, 2026. Six mistakes business-owner estates make, and the transcript alternative.
Succession Planning for Professional Practices
Covers the unique succession challenges facing law firms, medical practices, dental offices, and accounting firms, including ownership restrictions on non-licensed persons, buy-in and buy-out structures, valuation approaches, transition periods, and coordinating disability and death provisions with personal estate plans.
What If Your Estate Plan and Your Buy-Sell Agreement Contradict Each Other?
Explores how wills and trusts can conflict with buy-sell agreements and operating agreement transfer restrictions, and why coordinated review between estate planning and business documents helps avoid litigation, forced buyouts, and family conflict.
Estate Planning When You Own Real Estate in More Than One State
Explains how owning property in multiple states can trigger separate ancillary probate proceedings in each state, and how tools like revocable living trusts and LLC ownership can simplify administration and avoid multi-state probate.
Choosing a Trustee for a Trust That Owns a Business
Discusses the unique challenges of naming a trustee to hold a business interest, including the tension between business judgment and fiduciary caution, conflicts between beneficiaries who work in the company and those who do not, and practical options like co-trustees, corporate trustees, and trust protectors.
Trusts That Protect Your Kids From Their Inheritance
Explains why leaving business interests or wealth outright to children can expose those assets to creditors, divorce, and poor decisions, and how a properly structured trust with the right trustee and distribution terms can protect an inheritance while still benefiting the kids.
Transfer-on-Death Planning vs. Probate in Oklahoma
Compares Oklahoma's transfer-on-death deed for real estate to standard probate, and explains where this tool helps business owners and where a revocable trust is still needed.
What Happens to Your LLC Interest When You Die?
Explains how operating agreements, buy-sell agreements, and probate interact to determine what happens to a deceased owner's LLC membership interest, and why single-member LLCs need special planning.
Estate Tax and the Family Business: What's at Stake
Covers how business value factors into a taxable estate, the liquidity problem many family businesses face at death, and planning tools like Section 6166 deferral, valuation discounts, and lifetime gifting.
Revocable Trusts for Business Owners: What Goes In
Walks through which assets business owners should typically fund into a revocable living trust, including ownership interests, business real estate, and life insurance, and which assets usually stay out.
Why Business Owners Need More Than a Simple Will
Explains why a basic will falls short for business owners and what additional documents and planning, from trusts to buy-sell agreements, are needed to protect a company and its owner's family.
Federal estate tax exemption 2026: what Oklahoma owners miss
The federal estate tax exemption is $15 million for 2026 and Oklahoma has no estate tax. Why business owners still get portability, valuation, and liquidity wrong.