Tax Cuts & Jobs Act: Impact on Estate Planning & Ancillary Planning Areas

On Dec. 20, 2017, the House of Representatives passed, as the Senate had done a few days earlier, legislation called the “Tax Cuts and Jobs Act,”.  Although it has been delivered to President Trump, he likely will not sign it into law until the beginning of 2018 even though most of the provisions are effective for tax years beginning after December 31, 2017.   In other words, the President and his party have been able to deliver sweeping provisions that affect almost every aspect of tax, estate and other planning, far more than what anyone anticipated, in just about 7 weeks! That truncated time frame no doubt will result in a myriad of implications and nuances to the final legislation that were either not considered adequately and which will leave practitioners faced with unanticipated complications.