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Tax benefits for trustees and estate owners may be secured upon the termination of the trust or estate. Because estates and their beneficiaries are taxed as a single aggregate taxpayer, any tax benefit items that were available to the estate but not used can be passed out to eligible beneficiaries. These may include unused net operating loss and capital loss carryovers as well as excess deductions. Personal exemptions and unused charitable deductions cannot be passed out.

The traditional generation skipping trust planning could prevent couples from using their total $2 million generation skipping tax exemption when they die during different tax years. Only a portion of the deceased's estate is subject to generation skipping tax because the surviving spouse retains some property, leaving less than $1 million in the first estate. Therefore, the traditional marital and nonmarital qualified terminable interest property (QTIP) trusts do not fulfill a couples' needs and so a reverse QTIP trust is necessary. Other exemption planning opportunities are described.

The Treasury issued final regulations on Jan 28, 1992 concerning estate freezing under IRC section 2701 to clarify and simplify the valuation method for split interest estate transfers. The old rules used a subtraction method that assumed both parties would be working in their own self-interest when valuing the gifts which allowed abuse in cases where parents gift their children. The new regulations prevent such abuses and the best way to deal with them is to avoid estate freezing altogether by preserving voting rights rather than transferring a split interest.