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Keep up to date with the latest insights on tax planning for your equity, small business, crypto, real estate, and more.
Keep up to date with the latest insights on tax planning for your equity, small business, crypto, real estate, and more.
Life comes at you fast, and your financial needs may look very different today than they will a decade from now. With a Flip CRUT (Flip Charitable Remainder Trust ), you can plan in advance to change your trust’s format during its term. This strategy can give you the withdrawal flexibility of a NIMCRUT in the short term and the payout consistency of a Standard CRUT in the long term.
As you likely know by now, Charitable Remainder Unitrusts (CRUTs) are a form of tax-deferred account, like an IRA, designed to incentivize charitable giving in exchange for significant tax benefits: tax deferral and the ability to lower your tax rate via income smoothing.
A Flip CRUT, or a Flip Charitable Remaidner Unitrust, actually starts as NIMCRUT and then it “flips” to a Standard CRUT. It allows you to have more control over distributions initially, a characteristic of NIMCRUTs, and later benefits from the consistent distributions of a Standard CRUT. You might be wondering, “What does it look like in practice? and when do people use this structure?”
If you’re not familiar with the dynamics of Standard CRUTs and NIMCRUTs, it would be a good idea to take a spin through our posts on them. Understanding the fundamentals is necessary to fully acknoledge why a Flip CRUT could make sense for you.
While many of these steps may look familiar to other types of CRUTs, about half the steps are different due to the added dynamic of the flip provision.
Everything we do is designed to help you optimize for whatever is most important to you. For some people, it’s all about returns. For others predictability and minimizing risk win out. Still others think their needs might change over time. The main benefit of the Flip CRUT is that it allows you to initially maximize your returns for now with the NIMCRUT’s flexible distribution structure, and then you can switch to the consistent payouts of the Standard CRUT down the line.
People often consider a Flip CRUT in the following situations:
To help illustrate how a Flip CRUT is different from NIMCRUTs, we will walk through how each trust would work in some common Flip CRUT scenarios. Maybe you have illiquid assets, maybe you’re interested in planning for future uncertainty, or maybe you just aren’t comfortable with locking into a single charitable trust format for the entire length of the trust.
Many startup/small business owners and employees have experienced a rapidly growing equity in value, but they’re not going to be liquid until a secondary opportunity or a major liquidity event. So first, let’s highlights a few things about Standard CRUTs.
Standard CRUTs require a payout each year no matter what. But if you have only illiquid assets in your trust, this can be a problem: To meet the trust’s payout obligations, you might be forced to sell the shares when you didn’t want to or at a low price. And how could you solve this problem?
A flip trigger (or triggering event) is a specific event or time that determines when the trust flips from a NIMCRUT to a standard CRUT. The IRS has identified and pre-approved a few common triggering events, including flipping the trust:
The constants here are that, first, triggering events must not be “under the control of” the donor (you) or any other person. And second, Flip triggering events are typically designed to convert your trust to a Standard CRUT when you think you’ll need to start taking steady payments from your trust. Effectively this means that you can decide what sort of event would cause the trust to flip, but you cannot typically dictate or change the precise timing after the trust is formed.
In short, although everyone’s preferences and circumstances are different, this structure can be a good fit for customers who want to initially benefit from the NIMCRUTs distribution control to grow their assets faster but are want to lock in steady payouts in the future at the expense of potential higher returns.
At Valur we built a platform to give everyone access to the tax and wealth building tools of the ultra-rich like Mark Zuckerberg and Phil Knight. We make it simple and seamless for our customers to take advantage of these hard to access tax advantaged structures so you can build your wealth more efficiently at less than half the cost of competitors. From picking the best strategy to taking care of all the setup and ongoing overhead, we make it easy and have helped create more than $500m in wealth for our customers. Schedule a time to chat with our team and learn more about how we can help you!