Bad Question: “Do you do backdoor SLATs in Georgia”

Getting a good result from your estate planning starts with asking good questions that a tailored to your circumstances. Questions posed by AI to ask an estate planning attorney, especially when the prompts to ask the questions were posed by someone with more limited estate planning expertise, may lead you to a less than ideal result. You have to ask good questions to get a good answer and a good estate planning result. The question here is whether Georgia law permits creating a so-called “back door SLAT.” These are spousal lifetime access trusts (a trust one spouse creates to benefit the other) in which the beneficiary spouse can appoint the trust assets using a limited power of appointment to a trust for the settlor spouse on the beneficiary spouse’s death and still maintain estate exclusion for the settlor spouse. The idea is you create a trust for your spouse and on your spouse’s death the assets come back to you in trust but are still outside your estate and safe from creditors. If you may need access to the trust you are creating you might first evaluate whether you should even be creating the trust, or if so with less wealth to preserve access. You should consider options of creating a self-settled trust or one of the variations of that in a state that permits those trusts. If asset protection is a concern you might use a better jurisdiction. There are many other questions you need to ask to be sure you are getting what you need.