The Big Beautiful Bill just locked in a $30 million estate tax exemption for married couples. Permanently.
That’s double what it was a few years ago. Triple what it was a decade ago. For families sitting on $20-40 million in net worth, this feels like breathing room. Maybe even victory.
But here’s what nobody’s saying: raising the ceiling doesn’t change the game for people who weren’t playing it in the first place.
And for those who were? This just removed their last excuse.
What This Policy Actually Did
Let’s be clear about what happened. The federal estate tax exemption (the amount you can pass to heirs without triggering the 40% death tax) is now $15 million per person, $30 million per couple. And unlike the old version, which was set to sunset and drop back down, this one’s permanent.
That’s a big deal for families hovering near the threshold. If you were at $25 million and staring down a potential $10 million tax bill in a few years, you just got a lifeline.
But here’s the part most people miss: this exemption only matters if you were already thinking 10 years ahead.
Estate planning isn’t something you do when you hit $29 million. It’s something you engineer when you hit $5M; or even earlier. Because by the time you’re close to the limit, you’ve already made irreversible decisions about how your assets are titled, how your businesses are structured, and whether your wealth is set up to compound or get confiscated.
The exemption going up doesn’t help the family that built $50 million in real estate without ever setting up a Dynasty Trust. It doesn’t save the entrepreneur who took his company public and kept everything in his personal name. And it definitely doesn’t protect the second generation who inherited $30 million in liquid assets with no governance structure and watched it evaporate in 15 years.
Policy changes reward preparation. They don’t forgive neglect.
The Illusion of Safety
Here’s the dangerous part: some families will look at this and think, “Great, we’re under $30 million, so we’re good.”
That’s the trap.
Wealth doesn’t sit still. A $15 million business today could be worth $60 million in ten years. A $5 million real estate portfolio could 5X with the right market conditions. Life insurance death benefits alone can push families over the threshold overnight.
And even if you stay under $30 million federally, most people forget: state estate taxes don’t care about federal exemptions.
New York hits you at $7 million. Massachusetts at $2 million. California doesn’t have an estate tax, but it has sky-high income taxes that crush your heirs when they inherit IRAs or real estate. You could pass $25 million “tax-free” federally and still watch your kids hand $8 million to the state.
The exemption isn’t protection. It’s a head start. And most families waste it because they assume they have time.
They don’t.
What Actually Protects Wealth Across Generations
The $30 million exemption is a tool. But here’s what it can’t do:
It can’t stop your kids from fighting over the inheritance. It can’t prevent a messy divorce from splitting the family business in half. It can’t teach your grandchildren how to manage money they didn’t earn. It can’t protect assets from lawsuits, creditors, or bad investments.
What does? Structure.
The families that stay wealthy across generations aren’t the ones with the most money. They’re the ones with the tightest governance.
They use Dynasty Trusts to keep wealth outside personal estates. Forever. They fund ILITs with life insurance so liquidity flows tax-free into the family system when someone dies. They write Family Constitutions that define how money gets borrowed, invested, and passed down. They teach the next generation how to use the family bank before they inherit millions.
And they do all of this decades before they need it.
That’s what this exemption increase really means: it gives smart families more room to maneuver. More flexibility to transfer wealth, sell businesses, fund trusts, and layer strategies without triggering taxes.
But only if the infrastructure is already there.
The Move Nobody’s Making (Yet)
Here’s what I see happening over the next 5-10 years:
Families who were sitting on $20-40 million, waiting to see if the exemption would drop, are suddenly free to move. They can sell. They can gift. They can restructure. The estate tax is no longer the bottleneck.
That’s going to create a wave of liquidity events like business sales, real estate exits, generational transfers that were on hold for years.
But here’s the catch: that only works if you set up the structure first.
If you sell your $30 million company and dump the proceeds into a checking account, congratulations, you just reset the clock on estate tax exposure. That money’s going to grow, and in 20 years your kids will be right back where you started.
But if you sell and immediately flow the proceeds into a Dynasty Trust? Fund an ILIT with $5 million to create $50 million in tax-free death benefits? Use a QPRT to discount and transfer real estate at a fraction of its value?
Now you’ve locked in generational protection while the window is open.
The exemption increase isn’t the win. The win is using it before the rules change again.
The Real Question
Most people think estate planning is about avoiding taxes. It’s not.
It’s about choosing whether your wealth outlives you, or just your lifespan.
The $30 million exemption is now permanent. Great. But wealth compounds, markets shift, and families grow. What’s $30 million today could be $100 million in 20 years. And even if it’s not, the families that build lasting legacies aren’t the ones trying to stay under the limit. They’re the ones engineering systems that make the limit irrelevant.
So here’s the question this policy shift should force you to ask: Are you building a bank account, or are you building a dynasty?
Because the exemption just gave you room to do either. The difference is whether you’re thinking one generation ahead, or seven.