Toolkit · Wills and Estates

The Estate Planning and Wealth Transfer Toolkit

Type
Toolkit
Jurisdiction
National
Date
2026-02-12
Topic
Wills and Estates

This toolkit is a resource map of estate planning and wealth transfer. It walks the seven pillars of a modern plan: the core documents (will, revocable trust, durable power of attorney, and advance health-care directive); the difference between probate and non-probate transfers and how titling controls the outcome; the federal transfer-tax system of estate, gift, and generation-skipping transfer tax, along with the all-important basis step-up under Section 1014; lifetime gifting and trust strategies; planning for a spouse through the marital deduction, portability, and prenuptial agreements; asset protection; and the special problems of passing down intellectual property, publicity rights, and digital assets. Each pillar pairs plain-English doctrine with the governing authority — the Internal Revenue Code, the uniform acts, and the Copyright Act — and links out to UpLaw's deeper articles, checklists, and toolkits. A running worked example, the estate of fictional songwriter Cal Rendon, keeps the doctrine concrete. Read it as a map of where everything lives, then follow the links into the deep dives.

The Estate Planning and Wealth Transfer Toolkit

Wills and Estates > Estate Planning | Published 12 February 2026 - Updated 14 March 2026 | UpLaw - uplaw.us

An estate plan is not a stack of documents. It is a set of instructions for who decides, who receives, and how much the government and the courts take on the way. Get the titling and the tax right, and the documents almost run themselves.

Keywords: estate planning, revocable living trust, last will, durable power of attorney, advance directive, probate avoidance, estate and gift tax, GST tax, basis step-up, marital deduction, portability, annual exclusion, asset protection, prenuptial agreement, IP succession, digital assets

How to read this toolkit

Estate planning looks like a paperwork exercise — sign a will, sign a power of attorney, file it in a drawer — but it is really three overlapping systems that have to be steered together: the documents that name your decision-makers and beneficiaries, the titling that decides whether an asset ever sees a courtroom, and the transfer-tax rules that decide how much value survives the handoff. A plan that nails one and ignores the others fails quietly and expensively, usually years after the drafter has stopped paying attention.

This is a toolkit, not a form book. It is organized as a resource map: seven pillars, each with the plain-English doctrine, the anchor authority you can cite, and links into the UpLaw articles, checklists, and guides that go deep on the piece. Use it two ways. If you are building a plan from scratch, read top to bottom — the pillars are sequenced the way a competent planner works, from documents outward to tax and asset protection. If you have a specific question ("does my brokerage account go through probate?" "can I leave my copyrights to my kids?"), jump to the pillar and follow the deep-dive links.

Two cautions before you start. First, estate law is state law for the documents and titling, and federal law for the transfer tax — you are always working in two legal systems at once, and the state rules genuinely differ (community property versus common law, elective shares, homestead protections, self-proving affidavit formalities). Second, the transfer-tax numbers move every year with inflation and move dramatically with each act of Congress; treat every dollar figure here as a checkpoint to verify, not a constant.

A note on who does this work: estate planning sits at the intersection of tax, property, and family law, and the person you want is a dedicated trusts-and-estates lawyer, not a generalist. See Types of Lawyers: A Field Guide to Legal Specialties and Choosing the Right One for how the specialty maps to the problem.

The estate plan at a glance

Here is the whole landscape on one screen. Each item is a pillar below.

  • The core documents. A will, usually a revocable living trust, a durable power of attorney for finances, and an advance health-care directive (living will plus health-care proxy). These name your decision-makers and your beneficiaries.
  • Probate versus non-probate transfer. Most wealth passes outside the will — by beneficiary designation, joint title, and trust — and never touches probate. Titling, not the will, controls the bulk of the estate.
  • The transfer-tax system. Federal estate tax, gift tax, and generation-skipping transfer (GST) tax, unified around a single lifetime exclusion, plus the basis step-up that often matters more than the estate tax itself.
  • Lifetime gifting and trusts. Annual-exclusion gifts, larger gifts against the lifetime exclusion, and irrevocable trusts (ILITs, GRATs, dynasty trusts) that move future appreciation out of the taxable estate.
  • Planning for a spouse. The unlimited marital deduction, portability of the unused exclusion, credit-shelter planning, and the prenuptial or postnuptial agreement that sets the baseline of who owns what.
  • Asset protection. Keeping wealth reachable by your heirs but not by creditors, ex-spouses, or judgment plaintiffs — through entities, exemptions, and (at the aggressive end) domestic and offshore trusts.
  • Special assets: IP, publicity rights, and digital assets. Copyrights, patents, trademarks, the right of publicity, and the online accounts and files that the old documents never contemplated — each with its own succession rules.

Running example, used throughout: the estate of Cal Rendon, a fictional songwriter. Cal owns a house in Nashville held in his revocable trust, a brokerage account, a catalog of song copyrights (some written decades ago, some last year), a valuable right of publicity in his name and voice, and a tangle of digital accounts — streaming royalties dashboards, cloud drives full of unreleased masters, and social media. Cal's estate touches every pillar, which is exactly why we use him.

Pillar 1 — The core documents: will, trust, POA, and advance directive

Four documents form the spine of almost every plan.

The last will and testament. The will disposes of probate property, names an executor (personal representative), and — critically for parents — nominates a guardian for minor children, which no trust or beneficiary designation can do. Wills are creatures of state law, and the formalities are unforgiving: most states, following the Uniform Probate Code (UPC) § 2-502, require a writing signed by the testator and by two witnesses, and many allow a self-proving affidavit so the witnesses need not later appear in court. A will speaks only at death and only over property that has no other route out of the estate — which, as Pillar 2 explains, is often less than clients expect.

The revocable living trust. The workhorse of modern planning. The settlor (Cal) creates a trust, names himself trustee during life, and retitles assets into it. Because he keeps full control and the power to revoke, it is tax-neutral while he lives — the IRS ignores it, and Cal reports the income on his own return. At death, a successor trustee distributes or continues to hold the assets without probate, because the trust, not Cal, owns them. The Uniform Trust Code (UTC) supplies the default rules in most states. The revocable trust does not save a dime of estate tax by itself — a common and dangerous misconception — but it buys privacy, avoids probate in every state where Cal owns real property, and provides seamless management if he becomes incapacitated. Cal's Nashville house is already titled in his trust; that one act keeps the house out of Tennessee probate.

The durable power of attorney (financial). A document by which Cal appoints an agent to handle finances if he cannot. "Durable" means it survives his incapacity — the entire point. Without it, a family faces a court-supervised conservatorship, which is slow, public, and expensive. The Uniform Power of Attorney Act governs in many states and forces institutions to accept a properly executed POA. Pair it with a well-drafted revocable trust and the trustee/agent can manage nearly everything without a court.

The advance health-care directive. Two functions, sometimes in one document: a health-care proxy (naming who decides your medical care if you cannot) and a living will (stating your wishes on life-sustaining treatment). Add HIPAA authorizations so the proxy can actually get information.

Why it matters, and the traps. The most common failure is not a missing document but a funding failure — a beautiful revocable trust with nothing titled into it. An unfunded trust avoids nothing; the assets still go through probate under the will (which is why every plan needs a "pour-over" will as a backstop). Second trap: stale fiduciary nominations — the named executor, trustee, or agent moved away, fell out, or died. Third: out-of-state real property, which triggers a second "ancillary" probate unless it is held in trust or an entity. Cal's house is fine; if he buys a beach condo in Florida and takes title individually, his heirs face probate in two states.

Pillar 2 — Probate, non-probate transfers, and titling

Here is the counterintuitive core of estate planning: the will controls only a slice of most estates. Wealth moves through four channels, and only one of them is the will.

  1. Beneficiary designation. Life insurance, retirement accounts (401(k), IRA), and "transfer on death" (TOD) or "payable on death" (POD) brokerage and bank accounts pass by contract to the named beneficiary. The will is irrelevant to them. This is the single most powerful — and most neglected — estate-planning tool, because it is free, revocable, and probate-avoiding.
  2. Joint title with right of survivorship. Jointly held property passes to the surviving owner automatically. Convenient, but blunt: it can accidentally disinherit children, expose the asset to the joint owner's creditors, and waste tax planning.
  3. Trust. Property titled in a revocable or irrevocable trust passes under the trust's terms, outside probate.
  4. Probate under the will (or intestacy). Everything with no other route — property titled in Cal's sole name with no beneficiary — passes under the will, or, if there is no valid will, under the state intestacy statute (UPC Article 2), which distributes to relatives in a fixed order the decedent may never have wanted.

Why it matters, and the traps. The beneficiary-designation-versus-will conflict is the classic disaster: the will leaves "everything equally to my three children," but a $600,000 IRA still names the client's first spouse from a form filled out in 1998. The beneficiary designation wins — every time. The will cannot override it. Audit every designation and coordinate it with the plan. Second trap: naming the estate or an individual as an IRA beneficiary and losing the ability to "stretch" distributions; the SECURE Act's ten-year payout rule now governs most non-spouse beneficiaries and makes trust drafting for retirement benefits genuinely technical. Third: probate is not always the enemy. It is public and can be slow, but it also cuts off creditor claims after a short statutory window and provides court supervision where families fight. In small or simple estates, probate (or a small-estate affidavit under UPC § 3-1201) is cheap and fine.

For Cal: his brokerage account has a TOD to his daughter, his life insurance names his son, and his house and copyrights sit in the trust. If he does nothing else, almost nothing passes through his will — which means the will's careful language about the catalog is doing no work unless the copyrights are actually assigned into the trust. Titling is the whole ballgame.

Pillar 3 — The transfer-tax system: estate, gift, and GST tax; the basis step-up

The federal government taxes the gratuitous transfer of wealth through three coordinated taxes. For the vast majority of families they are irrelevant — but the income-tax consequence of death (the basis step-up) matters to almost everyone.

The estate tax. Section 2001 of the Internal Revenue Code imposes a tax on the taxable estate; the top rate is 40%. The gross estate (§§ 2031, 2033) sweeps in essentially everything the decedent owned or controlled at death — real property, accounts, business interests, life insurance the decedent owned, and the fair market value of intangibles like a song catalog. Against that, § 2010 grants a unified credit that shelters the basic exclusion amount — set at $15 million per person for 2026 and indexed thereafter (verify the current figure; this number has swung dramatically with recent legislation). A married couple can shelter twice that. Only estates above the exclusion owe any estate tax at all.

The gift tax. You cannot dodge the estate tax by giving everything away before death, so § 2501 taxes lifetime gifts, and the gift and estate taxes share one lifetime exclusion (that is what "unified" means). Two safety valves: the annual exclusion under § 2503(b) lets you give up to $19,000 per recipient in 2026 (indexed) to any number of people every year with no gift-tax return and no use of the lifetime exclusion; and unlimited direct payments of tuition and medical expenses under § 2503(e) if paid straight to the school or provider.

The generation-skipping transfer (GST) tax. A backstop under Chapter 13 that prevents families from avoiding a layer of estate tax by transferring wealth directly to grandchildren (skipping the children's taxable estates). It applies a flat tax at the top rate on transfers to "skip persons," with its own exemption (§ 2631) that tracks the basic exclusion amount. GST planning is where dynasty trusts live.

The basis step-up — often the real prize. Under § 1014, property included in a decedent's gross estate takes a new income-tax basis equal to its fair-market value at death. If Cal bought a rental property for $200,000 that is worth $900,000 when he dies, his heirs' basis becomes $900,000 — the $700,000 of appreciation escapes capital-gains tax entirely if they sell. This is why, for families below the estate-tax exclusion, the advice often reverses the old instinct: do not gift appreciated assets during life (a gift carries over the low basis under § 1015), and instead hold them until death to capture the step-up. Getting this right frequently saves more tax than any estate-tax maneuver.

Portability. A married couple no longer needs elaborate trusts merely to use both exclusions. Under § 2010(c), a surviving spouse can claim the deceased spouse's unused exclusion (the "DSUE") by filing a timely estate-tax return (Form 706) — but only if the return is filed, even when no tax is due. Missing the portability election is a common, avoidable, seven-figure mistake.

Why it matters, and the traps. Do not let a client sell appreciated assets, or gift them, without asking the basis question first. Do not assume portability happens automatically — it requires a filing. And remember that life insurance the decedent owns is in the gross estate; moving it to an irrevocable life insurance trust (Pillar 4) is how large policies stay out.

Pillar 4 — Lifetime gifting and trust strategies

For estates near or above the exclusion, the game is to move assets — and, more importantly, their future appreciation — out of the taxable estate while retaining as much control and benefit as the law allows.

Annual-exclusion gifting. The simplest strategy: give $19,000 per recipient per year (2026), or $38,000 as a married couple "splitting" gifts. Over a decade, across children and grandchildren, this quietly moves millions with zero tax and no return.

Larger gifts against the lifetime exclusion. Gifts above the annual exclusion use up lifetime exclusion but incur no out-of-pocket tax until the exclusion is exhausted. Front-loading gifts of appreciating assets while the exclusion is historically high can lock in value — but always weighed against the lost basis step-up.

Irrevocable trusts — the core vehicles.

  • Irrevocable life insurance trust (ILIT): owns a life insurance policy so the death benefit is outside the gross estate. Classic liquidity tool for estates that are asset-rich but cash-poor.
  • Grantor retained annuity trust (GRAT): the grantor transfers assets, retains an annuity for a term, and passes remaining appreciation to heirs nearly tax-free if the assets outperform the IRS hurdle rate. Ideal for volatile, high-growth assets.
  • Dynasty trust: a long-term (often perpetual, where state law allows) trust funded with GST exemption so that wealth compounds across generations without a transfer tax at each death.
  • Intentionally defective grantor trust (IDGT): irrevocable for estate-tax purposes but "defective" for income tax, so the grantor pays the trust's income tax — itself a tax-free gift to the beneficiaries.

The qualified disclaimer. Section 2518 lets a beneficiary refuse an inheritance within nine months, in writing, without having accepted any benefit; the property then passes as if the disclaimant predeceased. Disclaimers are a powerful post-death planning tool — a surviving spouse can disclaim into a credit-shelter trust to fine-tune the tax result after seeing the actual numbers.

Why it matters, and the traps. Irrevocable means irrevocable — these are one-way doors, and clients must genuinely part with control. The three-year rule (§ 2035) pulls life insurance back into the estate if the insured transfers an existing policy and dies within three years, so ILITs should ideally buy new policies. And every gift of a hard-to-value asset (a business interest, a song catalog) needs a qualified appraisal to start the gift-tax statute of limitations and defend the valuation.

Pillar 5 — Planning for a spouse: marital deduction and prenuptial agreements

Marriage is the single biggest variable in an estate plan, and it operates on two levels: the tax law that makes spousal transfers free, and the property law that decides what each spouse owns in the first place.

The unlimited marital deduction. Section 2056 allows an unlimited estate-tax deduction for property passing to a surviving spouse; § 2523 does the same for lifetime gifts. A person can leave an entire estate to a spouse with zero estate tax. The catch is that the deduction only defers the tax — it stacks the wealth into the survivor's estate, to be taxed at the second death — which is why couples pair the marital deduction with portability or credit-shelter trusts to use both exclusions.

The QTIP trust. A "qualified terminable interest property" trust qualifies for the marital deduction while letting the first spouse to die control who ultimately receives the property — indispensable in blended families, so the survivor is provided for but the children of the first marriage are not disinherited.

The non-citizen-spouse trap. The marital deduction is denied where the surviving spouse is not a U.S. citizen, on the theory that a non-citizen might leave the country with the untaxed wealth. The workaround is a qualified domestic trust (QDOT) under § 2056A. This is a live issue for international and immigrant families; where citizenship and immigration status intersect with the plan, see The Immigration and Citizenship Toolkit for the status questions that drive the tax result.

Prenuptial and postnuptial agreements. Before the tax rules ever apply, property law decides who owns what — and a marital agreement can rewrite the defaults. A prenup can define separate versus marital property, waive or fix elective-share and spousal rights, and protect a family business or a creative catalog from being divided or claimed. Enforceability turns on full financial disclosure, voluntariness, and independent counsel, and most states apply some version of the Uniform Premarital Agreement Act (UPAA) (or the newer Uniform Premarital and Marital Agreements Act). For the doctrine and drafting mechanics, see Prenuptial Agreements: An Overview of Enforceability and Drafting.

Why it matters, and the traps. Every state gives a surviving spouse an elective share — a statutory minimum (often one-third) that overrides a will trying to cut the spouse out; only a valid waiver (usually in a prenup) defeats it. In community-property states, each spouse already owns half of what was earned during the marriage, and community property enjoys a full double step-up at the first death — a large hidden benefit that changes the gifting math. And a marital agreement drafted without real disclosure and independent counsel is the first thing a surviving spouse's lawyer attacks.

For Cal: suppose he remarries. Without a prenup and updated documents, his new spouse's elective share could claim a third of the catalog, and the marital deduction would defer — not eliminate — tax while stacking the copyrights into her estate. A QTIP trust plus a prenup lets him provide for her income while steering the catalog itself to his children.

Pillar 6 — Asset protection

Asset protection is about keeping wealth reachable by your family but not by creditors, judgment plaintiffs, or an ex-spouse. It is a spectrum, from mundane and bulletproof to aggressive and contested.

The reliable, ordinary tools.

The aggressive tools. Domestic asset-protection trusts (DAPTs, available in a minority of states) and offshore trusts (Cook Islands, Nevis) put assets behind a trustee and a jurisdiction that will not honor a foreign judgment. They can be powerful and are also heavily scrutinized. For the full comparison — how they work, when they hold, and where they fail — see Domestic and Offshore Asset Protection Compared: A Wealth-Defense Field Guide.

Why it matters, and the traps. The cardinal rule: asset protection must be done before a claim arises. Transferring assets once a creditor is on the horizon is a fraudulent transfer (Uniform Voidable Transactions Act) that courts unwind and that can be a badge of bad faith. Protection planning is preventive medicine, not an emergency room. Second: a revocable trust offers no creditor protection during life — you can revoke it, so your creditors can reach it. Only irrevocable structures protect. Third: over-engineering invites attack and cost; for most families, insurance plus sensible entity use plus exemptions is the entire answer.

For Cal, the catalog is the asset most exposed to a business or personal judgment. Holding it in an LLC owned by his trust, insured and separated from his personal liabilities, is ordinary and effective — and far more defensible than an eve-of-lawsuit offshore transfer.

Pillar 7 — Passing down intellectual property, publicity rights, and digital assets

For creators, founders, and anyone with an online life, the most valuable and legally peculiar assets are the ones the classic documents never contemplated. IP and digital assets follow their own succession rules, and a plan built only for houses and brokerage accounts will mishandle them.

Copyrights. A copyright is personal property that passes by will or trust like anything else — but with two federal wrinkles that trip up even good planners. First, duration: for works created after 1977, copyright runs for the life of the author plus 70 years, so the asset keeps generating royalties long after death and must be managed, not just distributed. Second, and crucial, the termination of transfer right under 17 U.S.C. §§ 203 and 304. Congress gave authors (and, after their death, a statutory class of heirs — surviving spouse and children — in fixed shares) the inalienable right to terminate an earlier grant of rights and recapture the copyright decades later. This right does not pass by will; it passes to the statutory heirs by operation of the statute, and it cannot be waived or assigned in advance. A songwriter who "left everything to my trust" may find the termination right vesting in family members the trust never named. This is exactly Cal's situation with his older songs. For the mechanics and deadlines, see Copyright Renewal and Termination of Transfer: A Practical Checklist and, for the two-term background, Copyright Renewal and the Public Domain: Untangling the Two-Term System. For copyright fundamentals generally, Copyright Law: A Complete Overview and the batch-companion The Copyright Law Toolkit: A Complete Resource Library.

The right of publicity. The commercial value of a person's name, image, likeness, and voice. In many states — and this is the estate-planning key — publicity rights are descendible property that survive death and pass to heirs for a statutory term (in some states decades; in a few, effectively perpetual with use). For a songwriter like Cal, the right to license his name and voice may be worth as much as the catalog. Whether and how it descends is pure state law and must be planned deliberately. See The Right of Publicity: Controlling Commercial Use of Name, Image, and Likeness and the batch-companion The Right of Publicity and NIL Toolkit.

Patents and trademarks. Patents pass as personal property; trademarks pass only with the goodwill of the business they identify (a naked assignment is invalid), so a mark cannot simply be willed apart from the enterprise.

The unifying resource for creative-asset succession — copyrights, patents, publicity rights, and how they interact with the estate-tax and termination rules — is Passing Down Your IP: Copyright, Patents, Publicity Rights, and Estate Planning. Read it alongside this pillar for any estate with meaningful IP.

Digital assets. Email, cloud storage, social media, cryptocurrency, domain names, streaming royalty dashboards, and the loyalty of an online audience. The legal problem is access: terms-of-service agreements and federal privacy/anti-hacking law can bar a fiduciary from even logging in. The Revised Uniform Fiduciary Access to Digital Assets Act (RUFADAA), adopted in nearly every state, creates a tiered system: a user's directions in an online tool provided by the platform control first; then directions in the will, trust, or POA; then the terms of service. The practical takeaway is to grant your executor, trustee, and agent explicit authority over digital assets in the documents, use platforms' legacy-contact tools, and keep a secure, updated inventory of accounts and credentials (never in the will itself, which becomes a public record). Cryptocurrency is the hardest case: lose the private keys and the asset is simply gone, with no institution to petition. For the broader online-life legal stack, see Social Media Law: A Field Guide to the Legal Stack.

Why it matters, and the traps. The recurring failure is treating a catalog, a persona, or a crypto wallet like a bank account. The termination right defeats over-broad grants; the publicity right may or may not descend depending on the state of domicile at death (making domicile itself a planning decision); and digital assets can be legally inaccessible even to a named executor without the RUFADAA-compliant language. For Cal, the plan must (1) assign the copyrights into the trust and account for the non-assignable termination right, (2) confirm his state of domicile recognizes a descendible publicity right and direct its licensing, and (3) grant digital-asset authority and inventory the royalty dashboards and unreleased masters in the cloud.

The plan as a working checklist

Use this as the gated, one-glance version. Each item maps to a pillar above.

Documents (Pillar 1)

  • [ ] Executed will with executor and, if minor children, guardian nomination.
  • [ ] Revocable living trust — and it is actually funded (assets retitled into it).
  • [ ] Pour-over will as a backstop for anything left out of the trust.
  • [ ] Durable financial power of attorney.
  • [ ] Advance health-care directive (proxy + living will) with HIPAA authorizations.

Titling and beneficiaries (Pillar 2)

  • [ ] Every beneficiary designation (retirement, life insurance, TOD/POD) audited and coordinated with the plan.
  • [ ] No stale ex-spouse or deceased beneficiaries lurking on old forms.
  • [ ] Out-of-state real property held in trust or entity to avoid ancillary probate.

Transfer tax (Pillar 3)

  • [ ] Gross estate estimated against the current exclusion; estate-tax exposure known.
  • [ ] Basis-step-up analysis done before any sale or gift of appreciated assets.
  • [ ] Portability preserved (know that Form 706 must be filed at the first death to claim it).

Gifting and trusts (Pillar 4)

  • [ ] Annual-exclusion gifting program in place if appropriate.
  • [ ] Life insurance owned by an ILIT, not the insured, for large policies.
  • [ ] Qualified appraisals for gifts of hard-to-value assets.

Spouse (Pillar 5)

  • [ ] Marital deduction / QTIP strategy chosen; second-death tax modeled.
  • [ ] QDOT if the surviving spouse is a non-citizen.
  • [ ] Prenuptial/postnuptial agreement reviewed for disclosure, voluntariness, and independent counsel; elective-share waiver valid.

Asset protection (Pillar 6)

  • [ ] Umbrella liability insurance in force.
  • [ ] Operating businesses and rental real estate in entities.
  • [ ] Any advanced structure created well before any claim — never on the eve of a lawsuit.

Special assets (Pillar 7)

  • [ ] Copyrights assigned into the plan; termination-of-transfer rights (non-assignable) accounted for.
  • [ ] Right of publicity: domicile confirmed to recognize descendibility; licensing directed.
  • [ ] Trademarks kept with the business goodwill.
  • [ ] Digital-asset authority granted to fiduciaries (RUFADAA language); secure, current inventory maintained; crypto keys recoverable.

Maintenance

  • [ ] Whole plan reviewed after every marriage, divorce, birth, death, major asset change, move to a new state, and significant change in the tax law.

Primary Authority

Internal Revenue Code (Title 26, U.S.C.)

  • § 2001 — imposition of the estate tax (top rate 40%).
  • § 2010 — unified credit and the basic exclusion amount; § 2010(c) — portability of the deceased spouse's unused exclusion (DSUE).
  • § 2031 — valuation of the gross estate; § 2033 — property in which the decedent had an interest.
  • § 2035 — transfers within three years of death (life insurance).
  • § 2056 — unlimited marital deduction; § 2056A — qualified domestic trust (QDOT) for non-citizen spouses; § 2523 — gift-tax marital deduction.
  • § 2501 / § 2505 — gift tax and unified credit; § 2503(b) — annual exclusion; § 2503(e) — tuition and medical exclusions.
  • § 2518 — qualified disclaimers.
  • § 2631 — GST exemption (Chapter 13, generation-skipping transfer tax).
  • § 1014 — basis of property acquired from a decedent (step-up); § 1015 — carryover basis of gifts.

Uniform acts and state law

  • Uniform Probate Code (will formalities, intestacy, small-estate administration).
  • Uniform Trust Code (default rules for trusts).
  • Uniform Power of Attorney Act.
  • Revised Uniform Fiduciary Access to Digital Assets Act (RUFADAA).
  • Uniform Premarital Agreement Act (and the Uniform Premarital and Marital Agreements Act); Uniform Voidable Transactions Act (fraudulent transfers).
  • State elective-share, homestead, and right-of-publicity statutes (jurisdiction-specific).

Copyright Act (Title 17, U.S.C.)

  • § 203 — termination of transfers made on or after January 1, 1978.
  • § 304(c), (d) — termination of pre-1978 grants; the statutory class of heirs who hold the non-assignable termination right.

Secondary Sources

  • Restatement (Third) of Trusts; Restatement (Third) of Property: Wills and Other Donative Transfers.
  • Nimmer on Copyright (termination of transfers and descent of copyright).
  • McCarthy on Trademarks and Unfair Competition (right of publicity; assignment of marks with goodwill).
  • IRS Form 706 (estate tax return) and Form 709 (gift tax return) instructions.

Related UpLaw Resources

Related Guides & Articles

Related Checklists

Related Toolkits

This toolkit is general legal information from UpLaw (uplaw.us), not legal advice, and does not create an attorney-client relationship. Estate, tax, and property rules are state-specific and change frequently — the transfer-tax figures in particular are indexed annually and are periodically rewritten by Congress. Verify current requirements and consult qualified trusts-and-estates counsel before acting.