Life insurance trust
Open-knowledge reference entry
A life insurance trust is an irrevocable, non-amendable trust which is both the owner and beneficiary of one or more life insurance policies. Upon the death of the insured, the trustee invests the insurance proceeds and administers the trust for one or more beneficiaries. If the trust owns insurance on the life of a married person, the non-insured spouse and children are often beneficiaries of the insurance trust. If the trust owns "second to die" or survivorship insurance which only pays when both spouses are deceased, only the children would be beneficiaries of the insurance trust.
In the United States, proper ownership of life insurance is important if the insurance proceeds are to escape federal estate taxation. If the policy is owned by the insured, the proceeds will be subject to estate tax. (This assumes that the aggregate value of the estate plus the life insurance is large enough to be subject to estate taxes.) To avoid estate taxation, some insureds name a child, spouse or other beneficiary as the owner of the policy.
There are drawbacks to having insurance proceeds paid outright to a child, spouse, or other beneficiary.
Doing so may be inconsistent with the insured's wishes or the best interests of the beneficiary, who might be a minor or lacking in financial sophistication and unable to invest the proceeds wisely.
The insurance proceeds will be included in the beneficiary's taxable estate at his or her subsequent death.
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This entry incorporates text from “Life insurance trust” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.