6 Estate Planning Questions High-Net-Worth Clients Forget to Ask
Sam's List Editorial | 2026-06-06
6 Estate Planning Questions High-Net-Worth Clients Forget to Ask Most estate plans were built to solve the problem that existed the year they were drafted. A life insurance trust set up in 2015 was solving for a different federal exemption, a different family situation, and a different tax landscape than the one you're living in now. The federal estate tax exemption, retirement account distribution rules, digital asset ownership, and remarriage law have all moved materially in the last four years. For individuals with estates above $5M — and especially those with business interests, inherited IRAs, or significant digital assets — a plan that hasn't been reviewed since 2020 may have gaps that look small on paper and enormous at the worst possible moment. These are six questions worth bringing to your estate planning attorney and financial advisor. Not because they're easy, but because not asking them is how expensive surprises happen. 1. What Happens to My Estate If My Spouse Dies Before Me and I Remarry? Most estate plans assume the current spouse survives and that the family structure stays intact. That's a reasonable base case. It's not a comprehensive one. Without specific planning provisions — a remarriage clause, a QTIP trust, or a spousal lifetime access trust (SLAT) structured to protect children's inheritance — assets that pass to a surviving spouse can flow directly to a new spouse in a subsequent marriage. Children from a first marriage can be unintentionally disinherited. This isn't an obscure scenario: second marriages are common among high-net-worth individuals who divorce or become widowed in their 50s and 60s. If your estate plan treats "surviving spouse" as a permanent category rather than a role that could be filled by a different person, ask your attorney how your documents address that scenario specifically. 2. How Does the Federal Estate Tax Exemption Interact With My State Estate Tax? The federal estate tax exemption is high — historically high, in fact, though that may change. Twelve states and Washington D.C. still levy a separate estate tax with their own exemptions, some as low as $1-2 million. A client with an $8 million estate may have zero federal estate tax exposure and a material state estate tax bill — depending on their state of domicile. Massachusetts has an exemption of $2M. Oregon's is $1M. A client who assumes "my estate is below the federal threshold so I don't have an estate tax issue" may be wrong about their state obligation by six figures. If you own real property in multiple states, the analysis gets more...
