When civil unions became legal for same-sex couples in New Jersey last year, the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community celebrated a hard-won victory. But conflicting laws for LGBT partners at the state and federal levels have some business owners who live with same-sex partners worried about how the conflict may affect their estate planning.<\/p>\n
Each member of a civil union must file separate federal tax returns because federal law doesn\u2019t recognize civil unions.\u00a0There is a burden on small business owners because of the time spent on all the paperwork.<\/p>\n
Under federal law one member of a civil union who gives the other more than $13,000 in one year as a gift will eat into a $1 million lifetime gift-tax exclusion.<\/p>\n
The $1 million lifetime federal gift-tax exclusion counts toward the federal estate-tax exemption, a tax levied upon death that is currently capped at $2 million but scheduled to jump to $3.5 million next year.<\/p>\n
Meanwhile, members of a traditional marriage can gift each other unlimited amounts of money without being federally taxed, and can take federal-tax deductions on all assets left to each after death.\u00a0Gay and lesbian couples don\u2019t have that right.<\/p>\n
For state taxes such as the inheritance-transfer tax and the estate tax, same-sex partners in civil unions get the same exemptions as married couples.<\/p>\n
In New Jersey, an estate in excess of $675,000 is subject to the state\u2019s estate tax, however civil-union couples and married couples pay no tax on assets they leave to their spouse. Same-sex couples in domestic partnerships are exempt from the state\u2019s inheritance-transfer tax but not from the estate tax.<\/p>\n
LGBT business owners in New Jersey should\u00a0assemble a team comprised of a lawyer, an accountant and a financial adviser who are familiar with the laws surrounding same-sex couples.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
LGBT business owners in New Jersey should assemble a team comprised of a lawyer, an accountant and a financial adviser who are familiar with the laws surrounding same-sex couples.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_daextam_enable_autolinks":"","_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[31,32,33],"class_list":["post-1197","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-planning-for-tax-minimization","tag-civil-union-nj-tax","tag-gay-estate-tax","tag-lgbt-new-jersey"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/patellawoffices.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1197","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/patellawoffices.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/patellawoffices.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/patellawoffices.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/patellawoffices.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1197"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/patellawoffices.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1197\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/patellawoffices.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1197"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/patellawoffices.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1197"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/patellawoffices.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1197"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}