Keeping your home until death has advantages. At death, your estate avoids both capital gains and recapture taxes, and passes the home to your heirs at a stepped-up fair market value basis. This combination triggers a good number of income tax planning strategies.

The newly enacted tax cut creates a new 2011 and 2012 estate tax. The new rules are taxpayer friendly in two respects. First, they are easy to understand. Second, they contain a $5 million exclusion (portable, if properly elected, for husband and wife, giving a married couple an exclusion of $10 million).

Tax law gives choices to the executors who are handling the estates of those who died in 2010. Choice one is to apply the 2010 rules. Choice two is to apply the newly enacted 2011 and 2012 estate tax rules.

Section 1031 exchanges are perfect when you are going to stay in the real estate rental or investment business. When it’s time to cash out, you need to look at different strategies that help you avoid taxes and give you cash to spend (liquidy).

Distributing the assets of an estate needs a tax plan to ensure the favorable results embedded in the tax law.

Hiring your children can be a really good move. If you have a sole proprietorship or a husband and wife partnership, you can save a lot of money in taxes. Be careful, though, with corporations, LLCs, estates, and partnerships.

At death, IRAs are not treated like homes, which pass to the heirs at fair market value with no income tax issues. Instead, the IRA faces both the estate tax and the income tax. In this court case, the combined estate and income taxes devoured $1.6 million and the heirs had $1.1 million left to spend.

Current law deletes the federal estate tax in 2010 and then reinstates it at higher rates in 2011. The year 2010, when there is no estate tax, contains its own unique planning requirements. If you are concerned about taking care of your loved ones and protecting what you have worked so hard to build, free your mind of a major worry by getting your federal estate plan in order.

When you receive property in which you had an interest as a result of a family member’s death, make sure you clarify your income-tax basis in this property right away.