CIBC has cited estimates that roughly a trillion CAD will change hands between Canadian generations from 2024 through 2026, the largest transfer of its kind in the country’s history. Statistics Canada reports that the average size of a monetary gift to first-time home buyers rose 73% to $115,000 between 2019 and 2024. Nearly a third of first-time home buyers are now getting help from family to close the deal, up from a fifth in 2019. Whatever else is true about the Canadian economy right now, this is happening, and it is happening at a scale that will shape who owns what in this country for the next generation. It is worth noting, for reasons that will become clear a few sections from now, that some of CIBC’s own wealth commentary on this transfer repeats the claim that seventy percent of family wealth disappears by the second generation. It is a small, useful demonstration of how far that number has travelled, and how little scrutiny it has received along the way.
Almost everything written about this moment asks the same question: how do I leave the biggest possible estate, and how do I make sure the government does not take too much of it. That is a reasonable question. It is also, I think, the wrong one to build a family’s entire strategy around. The harder and more useful question is different: how does a household that has built real financial success turn that success into something that outlasts the person who built it, without either wrecking their own retirement or handing the next generation a pile of money that teaches them nothing about how to keep it.
I want to work through that question properly. Not with the usual estate planning checklist, and not with the number that gets repeated at every dinner party about how family wealth always disappears by the third generation, because that number turns out to be close to fabricated. I want to get the mechanics right first, because the mechanics in Canada are more consequential and less well understood than most people assume, and then I want to get the harder judgment calls right: when moving money early actually helps, when it does nothing at all, and when it makes things worse.
What Actually Happens When You Die in Canada
The single most repeated fact about Canadian estates is also the most misleading: Canada has no inheritance tax. This has been true since 1972. It is also nearly beside the point, because the absence of an inheritance tax does not mean death is a tax non-event. It means the tax arrives through a different door, and the resulting bill can still be substantial.
Here is the mechanism. When you die, the Canada Revenue Agency generally treats you as having sold your capital property immediately before death at fair market value. This is called deemed disposition, and it applies to non-registered capital property: your investment portfolio outside a registered account, a rental property, a cottage, private company shares. Half of whatever gain has built up over your lifetime becomes taxable income on your final tax return under Canada’s current 50% capital gains inclusion rate. If you owned an asset for thirty years and it appreciated substantially, that entire deferred gain can crystallize in a single tax year, on top of whatever else you earned that year.
Registered accounts work differently, and worse, in one specific way that surprises a lot of people. An RRSP or a RRIF is not capital property, so there is no fifty percent inclusion rate and no capital gains treatment. The entire fair market value of the account can be included as ordinary income on your terminal return. A $400,000 RRIF, on a final return where that income is falling into Ontario’s top combined bracket, can generate on the order of $214,000 in tax from that account alone. Add a non-registered account with $300,000 of accrued capital gains and you are looking at roughly another $80,000 at that same marginal rate, for a combined tax bill in the neighbourhood of $294,000 before probate is even part of the conversation. None of this requires an inheritance tax. It is simply what happens when decades of tax-deferred and tax-preferred growth all come due in the same tax year.
There is a genuine escape hatch for a spouse or common-law partner. A spousal rollover can defer both the deemed-disposition gain on capital property and the RRSP or RRIF income inclusion until the surviving spouse later disposes of the property, withdraws the registered money, or dies. This is why the largest tax event in many Canadian marriages is not the first death but the second one, and it is also why the planning conversation that matters most is often the one about what happens after both spouses are gone, not after the first.
A fact that trips up more families than it should: an adult, financially independent child cannot use anything like the ordinary spousal rollover on an RRSP or RRIF. Special rules exist for financially dependent children or grandchildren, particularly where an impairment is involved, but an ordinary financially independent adult child does not simply inherit the parent’s RRSP intact. People routinely assume that naming an adult child as RRSP beneficiary works the way naming a spouse as successor holder of a TFSA does. It does not.
The TFSA is much cleaner at death. The fair market value at the date of death can pass tax-free, although what happens to growth after death depends on the beneficiary and how the account is structured. If you name a spouse or common-law partner as successor holder, rather than merely beneficiary, the account itself continues and future growth remains sheltered. Name the spouse only as beneficiary and different rollover mechanics apply.
Quebec is a genuine exception, and worth getting right rather than glossing over. The province does not recognize a successor-holder designation on a TFSA, and it does not recognize a designated beneficiary for an ordinary deposit or trust-based TFSA. A surviving spouse in Quebec can still transfer an eligible survivor payment into their own TFSA without using their existing contribution room, using the exempt-contribution rules and filing the required CRA form within the applicable deadlines. That can preserve the shelter, but it is not the same thing as successor-holder status and the original account does not simply continue in the survivor’s hands. CRA’s current TFSA-at-death guidance lays out the distinctions, including the Quebec rules.
The principal residence exemption is the other pillar most families lean on, and it has a limit that surprises people who own a cottage as well as a home. A family unit can only designate one property as its principal residence for a particular tax year. If you have owned a house and a cottage simultaneously for twenty years, you are eventually making a choice about how the principal residence exemption is allocated between them.
A cottage bought decades ago for $150,000 and now worth $900,000, with none of those years sheltered by the principal residence exemption, carries a $750,000 gain. At the current 50% capital gains inclusion rate and Ontario’s top combined marginal rate, that is roughly $201,000 of tax. If the estate does not have that much sitting in cash or easily sold assets, the cottage itself may have to be sold just to pay the bill, which is precisely the outcome families building an estate around “the cottage stays in the family” tend not to see coming.
Probate, the cost most people fixate on, is usually smaller than the income-tax exposure. It is a provincial charge, not a federal one, and the range across the country is enormous. Manitoba has no probate fee. Alberta’s court fee is only a few hundred dollars even on a large estate. Ontario sits at the expensive end, with its Estate Administration Tax running at $15 per $1,000 above the first $50,000, which works out to $14,250 on a $1 million estate.
That is real money, and beneficiary designations on registered accounts and insurance policies can be a clean way to keep those specific assets outside the estate where provincial law permits. I have gone through the full Canadian will, beneficiary and estate-planning checklist in an earlier post if you want the complete rundown.
Adding an adult child as joint owner on other assets is sometimes suggested as a similar probate shortcut, and I would be careful with it. It can create its own tax consequences, expose the asset to that child’s creditors or a future divorce, and create disputes about beneficial ownership in a way a straightforward beneficiary designation does not. Set beside the income-tax consequences above, probate itself is often not the main event, which makes it a strange thing for so much consumer content to treat as the central cost of dying in Canada.
The Statistic Everyone Repeats and Almost Nobody Has Checked
You have heard the number. Seventy percent of family wealth disappears by the second generation, ninety percent by the third. Shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three generations. It gets cited in wealth management marketing, in family business seminars, in the kind of article that wants to scare you into buying a trust.
I went looking for where it actually comes from, because a number repeated that confidently for that long usually either has strong evidence behind it or none at all, and this one has almost none.
The trail runs back to a 1987 book by John Ward called Keeping the Family Business Healthy. Ward studied roughly two hundred family manufacturing businesses in Illinois and looked at whether those businesses remained under family control. That is a real finding about a real and fairly narrow thing: whether a specific manufacturing business in a specific American state stayed family controlled. It is not the same thing as measuring whether a family retained its wealth. A family whose business was sold, diversified and reinvested successfully could show up as a failure under a business-continuity measure and as a success under any sensible measure of family wealth.
Roy Williams and Vic Preisser later studied wealthy families and helped popularize a much broader seventy-percent failure claim around wealth transitions. The problem is that the evidence underneath the rule does not support the certainty with which it has been repeated.
Family wealth researcher James Grubman published a detailed citation trace called There Is No 70% Rule. His conclusion is that there is no defensible universal 70% rule for the failure of family-business or family-wealth transitions. The statistic is better understood as a piece of industry folklore built from limited research and repeated far beyond what the original evidence could support.
Here is what makes this worth more than a pedantic correction. Williams and Preisser also reported that communication and trust problems, unprepared heirs and the absence of shared purpose were important causes of failed transitions in their sample. Those precise percentages deserve skepticism too; Grubman’s critique raises questions about the methodology behind that research as well.
The broader insight is still worth taking seriously, but without pretending the percentages are settled science: tax structures and legal documents are only one part of a successful wealth transfer. A perfectly drafted trust cannot make an unprepared recipient capable of managing capital, and an optimized estate cannot create a shared family purpose that never existed.
The Timing Question, Done Properly
Here is a version of conventional wisdom that sounds almost too obvious to argue with: give with a warm hand, not a cold one. Money handed to your children while you are alive to see them use it is worth more than the same money left to them in a will.
I believed a version of this for a long time, mostly because the compounding math seems to make the case on its own. A hundred thousand dollars given to a thirty-year-old and invested for thirty years grows into something substantially larger than the same hundred thousand dollars sitting untouched until it is inherited at sixty.
That comparison is wrong, and it is worth being precise about why, because the correction changes what the rest of this section is actually arguing.
The comparison above is not “early transfer versus late transfer.” It is “invested money versus money that was never invested at all.” Nobody’s retained wealth just sits in a chequing account earning nothing for thirty years. If the parents keep the money and invest it themselves, earning the same after-tax return the child would have earned, the family ends up in exactly the same place regardless of whose name was on the account.
A hundred thousand dollars invested at five percent for thirty years by a parent is worth precisely the same amount as a hundred thousand dollars invested at five percent for thirty years by a child. The multiplier, one plus the rate raised to the number of years, does not care whose name is on the statement. Changing ownership, on its own, changes nothing about total family wealth.
I want to be direct about this because I think a lot of the writing on this subject, including an earlier version of my own thinking here, quietly assumes the parents’ money is doing nothing while it waits, and that assumption is doing all the work in the “give early” argument.
If two generations can earn the same after-tax return, giving money earlier creates exactly zero additional family wealth. Say that plainly, because it is the whole hinge of this section. The case for giving earlier begins only when something changes after ownership changes, not simply because ownership changed.
So if pure compounding cannot be the reason to transfer early, what actually is? Three real mechanisms, and one important way the whole strategy can backfire.
The first is tax location. Money held by a parent in an ordinary taxable account can eventually lose some of its return to tax. Money moved into a child’s TFSA can grow tax-free, provided the child has the room.
Run $100,000 at six percent for thirty years both ways, purely to isolate the mechanism. If all of the return is treated as a capital gain realized at the end and taxed at Ontario’s top marginal rate, the parent’s investment ends up around $447,000 after the final tax bill. Sheltered the whole time in a child’s TFSA, it reaches roughly $574,000. That gap, around $127,000 on a single $100,000 starting amount, comes from the tax treatment, not from the change in ownership itself.
Two things temper this in practice. First, a thirty-year-old in 2026 will not actually have $100,000 of TFSA room simply from accumulating room since turning eighteen. The $109,000 cumulative figure in 2026 applies only to someone who has been eligible since the TFSA began in 2009 and has never used the room. A younger adult has less. A large real-world transfer might therefore be spread among a TFSA, an RRSP if the child has earned income and contribution room, an FHSA if a first home is the goal, and taxable investments.
Second, moving an already appreciated investment into the child’s hands is not frictionless the way gifting cash is. Gifting appreciated shares or a fund to an adult child generally triggers a disposition at fair market value, so the parent can owe tax on the accrued gain at the moment of the gift. The cleaner version is often cash or an asset with little embedded gain, with future growth occurring in the child’s shelter.
And notice the condition attached to all of this regardless: the tax-location advantage only exists to the extent the child has useful tax shelter that the parent cannot use themselves. If the parent still has their own unused TFSA or appropriate RRSP room, filling that may be the simpler first move.
The second mechanism is debt avoidance, and it is one of the cleanest cases in this entire article because it does not require forecasting investment returns.
A dollar used to pay down or avoid a mortgage earns a guaranteed, after-tax return equal to the interest that would otherwise have been paid, for as long as that rate applies. At a mortgage rate around four and a half percent, a taxable investment has to earn materially more before tax to produce the same after-tax result, and unlike the mortgage saving, the investment return is uncertain.
I would not turn that into a universal rule that a family should always pay the child’s mortgage instead of investing. Capital gains can be deferred, future mortgage rates change, and long-run equities have a different expected return and risk profile. The point is narrower: avoiding a known borrowing cost has a certainty that an investment return does not.
A related version shows up in mortgage default insurance. A buyer putting down less than twenty percent may have to pay mortgage insurance premiums that can run into the tens of thousands of dollars and are normally added to the mortgage balance. A parental gift that gets the buyer to twenty percent can eliminate that cost, regardless of what the house does afterward.
The third mechanism is a genuinely productive use of capital: education, a first home that changes where someone lives and how much they pay to live there, or a business. These are real, but I would resist the temptation to turn any of them into a fixed rate of return. Education outcomes vary enormously by program and person. Businesses fail. Housing has transaction costs and local market risk. These are bets on a specific person’s specific path, not GICs.
Now the failure mode, and it deserves equal weight, not a footnote.
If the money that moves early gets consumed rather than invested, used to avoid debt, or put toward something productive, the family can lose most of what that capital might otherwise have become. A hundred thousand dollars consumed instead of invested costs the family, over thirty years at a five percent return, roughly $432,000 in foregone future value.
That is not a small asterisk on the timing argument. It is the mirror image of everything above it.
Put the whole thing together with two families, each starting with the same amount of capital over the same horizon. Family A keeps everything invested and eventually transfers it at death. Family B transfers portions earlier and retains the rest.
Build the comparison fairly, letting whatever the parents retain continue compounding, and something has to be true by construction: if both generations earn the identical after-tax return and nothing is spent, both families end up in exactly the same place. The tie is not a coincidence. It is what pure compounding predicts.
Introduce a genuine tax-location advantage on the early transfers, and Family B pulls ahead by the value of the tax saved. Use the early money to eliminate expensive debt or fund something with a genuinely better economic outcome, and Family B can pull ahead again. Have the recipient simply consume the transferred capital, and Family A can finish substantially ahead.
Same starting capital. Same horizon. Different outcomes.
Moving ownership from one generation to the next, by itself, creates no wealth at all. Changing what happens to the dollar once it moves — tax location, debt avoidance, a productive use, or its opposite, consumption — is the only thing that does.
Protect Generation One First
None of the above should be read as an argument for giving money away as early as possible. It is an argument for giving money away only once you know it is genuinely surplus, and that is a harder number to pin down than most people admit.
Retained capital is not sitting idle waiting to be criticized for underperforming a compounding chart. It is doing something the money in a spreadsheet cannot fully capture: preserving optionality against things nobody can forecast precisely.
How long you will live. What markets will do over the next twenty or thirty years. Whether one of you will need significant long-term care. Whether your housing needs will change. Whether a child or grandchild will hit a genuine emergency a decade from now that dwarfs anything you can imagine while you are still working.
A dollar you have already given away cannot simply be called back to cover any of that. A dollar you kept, and that turns out not to be needed after all, can still be given later, on better information.
That asymmetry, not caution for its own sake, is the actual argument for figuring out what “enough” looks like before doing anything else.
A household with $2 million is answering a genuinely different question than a household with $10 million, and the difference is not really about which sophisticated tools become available at higher wealth levels. It is about how much room exists, after conservative assumptions for retirement, inflation, housing and later-life care, before you are looking at money that has no realistic claim on your own future at all.
Until you have done that math specifically for your own household, with your own numbers, everything in the previous section is theoretical.
What Makes an Earlier Transfer Actually Worth Doing
Once genuinely surplus capital exists, the previous section already contains the honest checklist for what makes moving it early worthwhile: a tax shelter the child has and the parent cannot use; a debt the child is carrying at a rate the retained capital cannot reliably beat after tax; a home purchase where the down payment materially changes the financing terms; or education or a business opportunity with a credible expected benefit rather than an assumed one.
Registered plans can also create time-sensitive opportunities. An RESP can attract government grants during the contribution years. An FHSA combines a deduction on contribution with tax-free qualifying withdrawals for a first home. Those benefits cannot necessarily be recreated decades later when an inheritance finally arrives.
There is another category that does not show up cleanly in any of the dollar math above, and I think it may be more important for a lot of families.
A hundred thousand dollars at thirty can change what someone studies, where they live, whether they can afford to leave a bad job, whether they can buy a home, or whether they can take a real shot at starting or acquiring something of their own. The same hundred thousand dollars, or even several times that amount, arriving at sixty may change much less for someone who has already spent three decades making those decisions without it.
This is not a compounding argument in disguise.
It is a claim that the usefulness of money and the size of a family’s terminal net worth are two different things. A family that only optimizes for the second one can end up with a larger number and a smaller actual effect on anyone’s life.
What Makes an Earlier Transfer a Mistake
The reverse list matters just as much.
Money consumed rather than deployed erases much of what the capital might otherwise have produced. Divorce and family-law exposure can complicate outright gifts. Creditor exposure from a lawsuit or failed business can reach assets that have already been transferred in ways it could not reach capital still owned by the parents. Depending on the circumstances, a properly documented loan may preserve protections that an outright gift does not.
And an heir who receives significant capital without ever having been part of a conversation about where it came from, what it is for, or how it was built has a very different starting point from someone who has gradually demonstrated an ability to manage smaller amounts.
None of this is solved entirely by better paperwork. Legal structure matters, but so does preparation before the money moves.
The Family Business Question
A portfolio of index funds divides cleanly among children. A business does not, and business owners face a version of all of the above with much higher stakes attached.
Canada’s tax rules on selling a business to your own children historically created a major problem under section 84.1 of the Income Tax Act. Bill C-208 changed those rules in 2021, and the framework was subsequently tightened for dispositions from January 1, 2024 onward to require a genuine intergenerational transfer.
The current rules provide two broad pathways: an immediate intergenerational business transfer built around a three-year test, or a gradual transfer with conditions running over roughly five to ten years. Finance Canada’s explanation of the current intergenerational-transfer framework is worth reading before assuming that transferring shares to a child’s corporation automatically qualifies.
The Lifetime Capital Gains Exemption is another major piece of this. For 2026, the indexed LCGE is $1,275,000 per qualifying individual on eligible qualified small business corporation shares and qualified farm or fishing property. I have a separate deep dive into the 2026 Lifetime Capital Gains Exemption and the QSBC tests because the qualification rules matter at least as much as the headline number.
The liquidity question is particularly sharp for a business owner. Consider a company worth $5 million with a negligible adjusted cost base, owned equally by two spouses who can each use the full 2026 LCGE. Their combined exemptions could shelter $2.55 million of the gain. That leaves roughly $2.45 million of capital gain exposed. At the current 50% inclusion rate, about $1.225 million becomes taxable income. At Ontario’s top combined marginal rate, the resulting tax is roughly $656,000, before considering other income, deductions, AMT effects or planning.
That is an illustration, not a tax quote, but it shows the liquidity problem.
A diversified public portfolio can be partially sold to cover a tax bill without destroying the asset itself. A private operating business usually cannot be carved up and sold in the same way. That is one of the situations where permanent life insurance can have a legitimate estate-planning role: not as a magical investment, but as a source of liquidity against a predictable tax liability.
An estate freeze can solve a different problem. It can lock in the current owner’s economic value while shifting future growth to the next generation or a family trust. For the right incorporated business owner, that can be worth the complexity well before similar planning would make sense for someone whose wealth is simply a portfolio of public securities.
Families holding business shares inside a trust as part of an older freeze should also know about the twenty-one-year rule. Canadian tax rules generally deem many trusts to dispose of and reacquire their capital property at fair market value every twenty-one years, preventing gains from being deferred indefinitely inside the trust. Trusts established in the mid-2000s are therefore reaching or passing important planning dates now.
Underneath all of this sits a question that has nothing to do with tax: should the business stay in the family at all?
I do not think selling a successful business is a failure, and I think the framing that treats a sale as giving up does families a disservice. A sale can convert a single concentrated, illiquid asset into diversified capital the family can allocate much more freely.
Keeping the business only makes sense if there is a successor who genuinely wants to run it, is capable of running it, and the family has thought honestly about what happens to the children who do not work in it.
And if the eventual exit is to an outside buyer, whether the transaction is structured as a share sale or an asset sale can radically change the tax outcome. I have worked through that separately in Asset Purchase vs Share Purchase in Canada.
Which brings up the harder, more personal question underneath the tax mechanics.
What Fair Actually Means
One child spends fifteen years building the family business alongside a parent. Another becomes a teacher and has no involvement in it at all. Does fair mean each of them receives the same dollar amount at the end, or does it mean something closer to each of them being treated equitably given what they actually contributed and what they actually need?
I do not think there is a universal answer here, and I am suspicious of anyone who tells you there is.
But I think the useful distinction is between equal and equitable, and it is worth making explicit rather than avoiding.
Equal means identical dollar amounts regardless of circumstance. Equitable means accounting for the child who built the business, the child who needed help buying a first home at thirty because the other did not need it until forty, or the child who has a disability and a lifelong financial need the others do not share.
Tools exist to close this gap without dividing an operating business in half: voting versus non-voting shares that let one child run the company while both children hold economic value in it, life insurance used specifically to provide liquidity or equalize what a non-operating child receives, or simply an honest conversation, held while everyone involved is still alive to have it, about why the split looks the way it looks.
The conversation is the part families skip, and it is also the part that determines whether the eventual split feels fair or feels like a wound that outlasts the money.
A Decision Framework
Pull all of this together and the sequence, in my view, looks like this.
- Work out what your own household actually needs across a long retirement, a real inflation assumption, and a genuine later-life care scenario, using conservative numbers rather than optimistic ones. Do not skip this step or treat it as a formality.
- Only capital clearly in excess of that number is a candidate for anything discussed below. If you are not confident something is surplus, it is not surplus yet.
- For that surplus capital, ask whether a specific mechanism actually applies: unused tax-sheltered room in a child’s hands that you cannot use yourself, a debt at a rate your own retained capital cannot reliably beat after tax, or a use — education, a first home, a business — with a credible expected benefit that is not simply assumed.
- If none of those mechanisms apply, retaining the capital is at minimum a tie on the pure dollar math and a clear win on your own flexibility. There is no penalty for waiting until a real reason appears.
- Before any of it moves, have the conversation about where it came from and what it is for. The structure of the transfer matters, but so does whether the recipient has demonstrated an ability to manage capital.
- Only after all of the above is settled should trusts, estate freezes or permanent life insurance enter the conversation, and only to solve a specific, identified problem rather than as evidence of having done sophisticated planning.
What I Would Actually Do
I will not pretend to disclose our own household’s numbers here, and I do not think doing so would make the argument stronger anyway. But the philosophy behind it is worth being direct about.
I would make my own retirement and later-life security difficult to break before I did anything else, using conservative assumptions rather than the ones that happen to let me feel generous sooner. I am not interested in maximizing the size of an estate simply for the sake of a larger number showing up on paper after I am gone. That number does not do anything for anyone.
Once capital was clearly surplus under those conservative assumptions, and only then, I would lean toward moving some of it while the next generation was still young enough for it to actually change their trajectory rather than merely pad a balance they already had.
I would favour uses that build capability rather than uses that simply increase a bank balance: education, equity toward a first home, registered-account contributions where the room and government incentives make it worthwhile, or a real stake in a business someone in the family is actually capable of running.
I would not transfer meaningful amounts simply because a child hit a particular birthday.
Age is not the qualifying condition.
Demonstrated judgment with smaller amounts, and an honest conversation about what the money is for, would matter more to me than a calendar.
I would treat trusts, freezes and insurance the way I treat any other tool: useful for a specific problem, not evidence that I have done sophisticated planning. A will and the right beneficiary designations solve much of what many families actually need. More elaborate structures earn their complexity only when a specific fact pattern — an operating business, a genuinely large estate, a real liquidity gap — calls for them.
There is one more distinction underneath all of this that I think matters more than anything else in this article, and it is worth naming directly rather than letting the article simply arrive at it.
Most families think about inheritance as something that ends: money moves from one generation to the next, and it becomes that generation’s to spend, keep or lose, full stop.
I think the more durable version of multi-generational wealth treats capital differently, closer to something handed down to be used well and then extended rather than simply owned and consumed.
That does not require a dynasty trust or a family office. It can be as simple as a household expectation, stated plainly rather than left implicit: education gets funded, real business or first-home capital may be available when it matters, conspicuous consumption is your own problem to fund, and if this capital changes your life in some real way, part of what comes with that is creating the same kind of optionality for whoever comes after you.
That expectation, more than any trust or freeze, is what turns a transfer into a system rather than a windfall.
None of this is a formula. It is a sequence: protect the people who built the wealth, tell the truth about what is actually surplus, use it for something that builds capability rather than dependence, and let the legal paperwork follow those decisions instead of leading them.
Multi-generational wealth, in the end, is not an estate. It is a family system for deciding when capital is genuinely surplus, who can put it to productive use, what capability ought to travel alongside it, and how each generation leaves enough optionality behind to do the same thing again.
This post documents my own research and thinking. It is not personalized financial, legal, or tax advice. Tax rules and individual circumstances change. Talk to your own accountant or estate lawyer before acting on your own situation.