Edelman Financial Engines, the registered investment advisor and managed accounts provider with more than $300 billion in assets under management, has made several changes to its leadership team across its corporate and wealth planning organizations. 

That includes naming Steve Gaven as chief financial officer, effective June 1. Gaven replaces Suzanne van Staveren, who left the firm earlier this year to join an insurance brokerage. 

Gaven joins EFE’s executive team from SageView Advisory, a retirement plan-focused RIA acquired by Creative Planning late last year, where he was chief growth officer. 

The firm has also restructured its wealth planning leadership around three key areas on the wealth side of the business, said Ralph Haberli, president and CEO of EFE. That includes enabling planner success at the firm, attracting more planners to EFE, and taking on the next big transformational initiatives. 

Related:Osaic’s Head of Business Development Departs

The RIA has hired Ro Mehrotra to take on that first pillar as senior vice president of wealth client. Mehrotra joins from First Citizens Bank, where he was head of client experience and senior vice president of the wealth planning group. At EFE, he will oversee the firm’s wealth planning organization. 

Jason Karmelek, the former vice president and head of recruitment strategy at Commonwealth Financial Network, will handle that second pillar, joining as senior vice president and head of planner growth. In that role, he’ll focus on attracting, developing and supporting advisors. 

Amin Dabit, a senior vice president of wealth planning at EFE, will oversee the new initiatives, shifting into the role of senior vice president of wealth strategy. That position includes oversight of planner support infrastructure, planning capabilities and the integration of technology and artificial intelligence into the client relationship. One of those new initiatives will be helping planners develop teaming structures, Haberli said. 

“[These roles] allow us to put a higher degree of focus on the most important parts of the business,” Haberli said. “They’re capabilities and functions that we’ve had, but just not at this level of seniority and leadership. It allows us to right-size the leadership horsepower we have against the task ahead, allowing our leaders to go a bit narrower and deeper on specific outcomes that matter to clients and to planners.”

This follows news in March that EFE expanded its employee equity ownership with a $175 million equity distribution to the firm’s financial planners. The firm also announced plans to introduce a discretionary co-investment option for all planners later this year. 

Related:Former Epstein Banker Paul Morris Departs BofA’s Merrill Unit

Bonnie Treichel is the Founder and Chief Solutions Officer of Endeavor Retirement, a consulting firm dedicated to solving problems for plan sponsors, advisors and service providers in the retirement plan industry. Her unique experience as an ERISA attorney and advisor helps her bring governance solutions for day-to-day issues that are an inevitable part of running a successful retirement plan. Bonnie is also a Partner at Endeavor Law, a firm dedicated to supporting the ecosystem of financial services with their retirement plan-related decisions, documentation, compliance, regulation and litigation.

 

As a thought leader on retirement plan governance issues, Bonnie is the author of Your Retirement Sketchbookand has been quoted in publications such as The Wall Street Journal, Kiplinger, InvestmentNews, 401(k) Specialist, Ignites, PlanAdviser, NAPA Net Daily, and Journal of Pension Benefits. She is an active member of the American Retirement Association and has served in various leadership roles as well as the American Bar Association’s Tax Division where she is on the Lifetime Income Committee. She was awarded InvestmentNews 40 Under 40 in 2023, the ABA’s On the Rise – Top 40 Young Lawyers Award in 2022, and NAPA Top Influencers for 2024 and 2025. She is also a member of the Women in Pensions Network, the State Bar of California, the State Bar of Kansas, current advisory board member of RISA, LLC and board member for the FinServ Foundation. Bonnie is the co-author of Your Retirement Sketchbook alongside Jamie P. Hopkins.

 

When she isn’t working on retirement plan issues, Bonnie enjoys traveling, spending time with her golden retrievers, Sadie and Sunny, running, riding her bike and volunteering for Make a Wish.  

Private placement life insurance (PPLI) seems to be all the rage these days in wealth planning conversations.¹ As estate-planning advisors, we’re regularly called on to advise on both life insurance strategies and, increasingly, income tax planning. It should come as no surprise, then, that more clients are asking about PPLI, which sits squarely at the intersection of those two disciplines. Too often, however, clients approach us having heard only about the potential income tax advantages of investing through PPLI policies, without a clear understanding of how those benefits are realized and the relevant trade-offs to obtain them. In practice, these conversations most often begin with a client presenting a PPLI proposal and asking whethe…

Edward Jones is facing a class action lawsuit from six Black advisors and former employees for the firm, claiming company policies put them in a position where they received “less compensation, fewer promotions and are terminated more frequently than their white peers.”

The lawsuit was filed in a federal court in Missouri by former Edward Jones employees Roland Martin, Elwis Johnson, Trevor Edwards, Shawna Knutson, Santoria Texidor and Alonzo Hinton, who are based throughout the country. According to the suit, the alleged discrimination they detail in the suit isn’t a “disparate impact case,” claiming that “Edward Jones knows that Black (financial advisors) are compensated less than their white peers, but has done little to correct this discrimination.”

The plaintiffs claim discrimination in the firm’s client transfer policy, which most often occurs upon an advisor’s retirement or when a senior advisor offloads client assets to a junior advisor to grant them a leg up in building a book of business (while advisors can request to make a specific transfer, the firm leadership oversees and approves the transfers).

Related:Raymond James Recruits $2.8B Team From Commonwealth

According to the suit, advisors can, on average, receive “tens of millions of dollars’ worth of client accounts” when starting at Edward Jones, and senior advisors can choose which junior advisors receive their transferred assets (under the firm’s “GoodKnight” policy). The plaintiff claims this results in a reality where a “predominantly white (financial advisor) workforce transfers their client accounts” to other white advisors with the blessing of a “predominantly white Edward Jones Home Office, which tracks and approves” transfers.

The situation is made worse by Edward Jones hiring policies that the plaintiffs claim” explicitly encourage nepotism.” The result, they argue, is that Black advisors receive fewer assets, or none at all and the quality of those assets tends to be poorer. 

“These disparities compound over time, with Black (financial advisors) receiving less compensation and fewer career advancement opportunities than their white peers,” the complaint read. “Their core story is common to Black (financial advisors) across the country.”

Edward Jones faced a similar lawsuit in 2022, in which several advisors claimed the firm’s “GoodKnight” program led to opportunities being disproportionately offered to white male advisors at the expense of other employees. Six years later, the suit remains ongoing.

In the latest case, the six plaintiffs each detail their challenges in building books of business within Edward Jones (all eventually left the firm), but some detail specific alleged instances of racism. In one case, Roland Martin detailed a meeting with the firm’s compliance director, regional leader and three members of the management team regarding his performance.

Related:LPL Attracts $1B Florida Team From Ameriprise

“After going through his existing book of business comprised of primarily Black households, the compliance director stated, ‘maybe the type of clients that you’re getting aren’t ideal for Edward Jones,’” the complaint read. “Plaintiff Martin understood this comment to be racial. Plaintiff Martin resigned from Edward Jones in September 2022 to start his own practice, where his ‘type of clients’ would be appreciated.”

An Edward Jones spokesperson said the firm strongly denies the allegations, “which do not reflect our values or how we operate as a firm.”

“Edward Jones takes its responsibility to promote fairness, respect and inclusion seriously and does not tolerate discrimination or bias in any form,” they said. “We intend to defend the matter and remain focused on supporting our associates, serving our clients, and acting in accordance with our purpose and values.”

It’s been just over two years since the SEC approved the first spot crypto ETFs. Today there are more than three dozen such funds on the market with nearly $120 billion in assets under management. Advisor use of crypto ETFs has steadily risen in that time. However, they are not the only tools available for crypto allocations. 

While crypto ETFs are an easy way to gain some crypto exposure, for other clients, more sophisticated products might be a better option. Those include SMAs, model portfolios, options-based crypto ETFs. 

The latest significant development came last week when Prometheum Inc., a crypto platform designed to comply with SEC regulations and FINRA rules, through its subsidiary Prometheum Capital, launched Digital Brokerage Solutions. The product is a suite of correspondent clearing, custody and trading services that enable broker/dealers to offer clients access to crypto assets—including digitally-native securities, tokenized securities and select crypto tokens—through traditional brokerage accounts. Initial correspondent clearing clients included Arete Wealth Management, Network 1 Financial Securities and a clearing broker/dealer.

Related:10 Investment Must Reads for This Week (May 5,2026)

Through the tool, b/ds and their clients can interact with crypto assets through brokerage workflows and existing account structures. Prometheum Capital offers correspondent clearing services to both introducing and clearing broker/dealers, on a fully disclosed and omnibus basis.

“As products move on the chain, you need the infrastructure to empower that,” said Aaron Kaplan, founder and co-CEO of Prometheum. “The crypto industry was built at the expense of the brokerage industry that wasn’t able to participate in the digital space because of gold regulatory handcuffs. With this, advisors and b/ds can compete with crypto platforms. … The way I see it, you should be somewhere in the 5% to 10% range for allocations into crypto. Historically, b/ds and RIAs have not been able to do that. Once it’s integrated, they can offer these assets to users and allocate as they think is appropriate.”

In connection with the launch, Prometheum cleared and settled what it said was the first ETH transaction directly in a U.S. brokerage account. 

“It’s working with the underlying token. It’s a really big deal,” Kaplan said. “It’s a major step forward for everyone.” 

Prometheum was licensed as a digital custodian in 2023. In late 2025, it received correspondent clearing authority.

Arete Wealth entered into a fully disclosed correspondent clearing agreement with Prometheum Capital, enabling its advisor network to offer crypto and digital assets directly to client brokerage accounts through Arete’s existing wealth management platform. (Arete Wealth currently has about $7 billion in assets under advisement across more than 60 offices and 260 registered reps.)

Related:Stablecoins, Trust Banks and World Liberty Financial International

“Adding digital and crypto assets through Prometheum Capital’s fully disclosed clearing means our advisors can manage clients’ investments and exposure to ETH and digital securities,” Arete Wealth CEO David Levine said in a statement. “Advising and managing clients’ exposure to digital assets will enable our advisor network to succeed as crypto assets become mainstream.”

In addition, Network 1, a full-service FINRA member b/d serving high-net-worth individuals, institutional investors, managed pension funds and hedge funds, also entered into an agreement with Prometheum Capital enabling it to extend ETH access directly to its clients’ brokerage accounts.

“We’ve seen significant interest. The b/d and advisor channels have been handcuffed,” Kaplan said. “They have lost clients. They have lost assets. For the first time, they can compete here.” 

Nitrogen Adds Bitwise Model Portfolios

In separate news, this week, Bitwise Asset Management, a global crypto asset manager with $11 billion in client assets, and Nitrogen, an AI-powered suite of products for financial advisors, made Bitwise’s crypto model portfolios available on Nitrogen’s platform. 

Related:Bron Brings Succession Planning to Crypto

Bitwise launched the model portfolios earlier this year. The portfolios, tailored to serve different investor risk preferences, allow financial advisors to give their clients access to digital assets through ETFs, including spot crypto ETFs, crypto index ETFs, thematic ETFs and crypto equity ETFs.

“Partnering with Bitwise gives advisors a research-driven framework to put that into practice in the crypto space, and do it with confidence,” Justin Boatman, chief marketing officer and head of product strategy at Nitrogen, said in a statement. “Bitwise brings the kind of specialist expertise this space demands, and we’re proud to be the platform that puts it in front of tens of thousands of advisors.”

Crypto SMAs

Another firm offering a more sophisticated product is Eaglebrook Advisors, a digital asset platform that allows advisors to invest directly in crypto through tax-optimized separately managed accounts, including Bitcoin and Ethereum SMAs, custom SMAs and strategies managed by third-party investment managers.

The firm is now working with 105 wealth management firms that manage $2 trillion in assets overall, according to Chris King, CEO and founder of Eaglebrook. 

The crypto SMAs offer several advantages over ETF exposure, including the ability to deliver tax alpha and help address concentrated positions by allowing investors to diversify into other crypto assets without triggering a taxable event. 

“It’s a solution if you have, say, $10 million in Ethereum, or $500,000 in Solana,” King said. “It’s a seamless compliance solution that integrates into estate plans or can be put into a trust and integrated into reporting. That’s a big thing we’re doing. It adds AUM for advisors and revenue to their businesses.” 

It is also direct ownership of underlying assets, unlike crypto ETFs.

“ETFs are easier to access, but you can’t generate tax alpha or own it directly. And there can be tracking error,” King said. “All you can do is sell into cash.”  

Crypto ETFs Evolve

Within crypto ETFs themselves, the market has evolved in a few directions since the first round of launches. 

While the initial batch of spot ETFs focused only on bitcoin, the SEC subsequently approved ones using other tokens, including Ethereum and Solana, as well as funds that offer baskets of different currencies or invest in crypto companies rather than crypto tokens. 

Another major innovation has been the emergence of options-based ETFs, including protected Bitcoin ETFs, an area where asset manager Calamos has led the way. It currently offers a variety of funds (including laddered versions) with 100%, 90%, and 80% protection levels. (Investors give up some upside in exchange for protection on the downside.) The products could be particularly attractive for clients with large crypto holdings already, who want to protect their principal. The firm launched the products last October, and the ETFs performed as designed amid a sharp crypto selloff that occurred earlier this year. The ETFs hold $150 million in assets.

There’s also the NEOS Bitcoin High Income ETF (BTCI), an actively managed options income Bitcoin strategy with a $1.3 billion AUM, the largest Bitcoin options premium income ETF in the market. It distributes monthly income generated by writing call options on Bitcoin Futures ETFs. (BlackRock and Goldman Sachs have filed to launch similar strategies.)

Overall, according to FUSE Research, one-quarter of the financial advisors it has surveyed allocate to crypto, with RIAs and wirehouses doing so more than IBDs. As of November, an additional 15% of the advisors FUSE surveyed planned to use crypto within the next two years.

Analysis of 13-F filings also sheds light on RIA usage of crypto ETFs. Analysis from AdvizorPro found that only 4% of practicing RIAs hold any crypto ETFs. (That does not account for exposures to crypto outside of ETFs, however. More sophisticated clients often own crypto directly through crypto custodians or private vehicles. Those allocations do not show up in 13-F filings.)

A similar analysis of RIAs’ 13-Fs from Discovery Data found that BlackRock’s iShares Bitcoin Trust ETF (IBIT) is the most popular crypto ETF in the space. In fact, it accounts for just more than half ($22.7 billion) of the roughly $40 billion allocated to crypto ETFs by RIAs. iShares Ethereum Trust ETF (ETHA) is the second-most-popular ETF ($4.6 billion). 

Anyone who has followed my work over the years knows I don’t trade in spin.

For more than 30 years in this industry, I’ve been known for one thing above all others: telling the truth about what is actually happening, calling balls and strikes the way I see them, and refusing to let comfortable narratives go unchallenged. That stance doesn’t always make me popular. I’m okay with that. This industry doesn’t need more polite consensus. It needs more honest perspective from people who have actually done the work, watched the trends from the inside for decades, and are willing to say out loud what others won’t.

So when it was first reported that Ameriprise raised its recruiter bounty to 16%, a new high-water mark in the industry, and the conversation immediately devolved into the predictable half-truths about “recruiters cashing in,” I had something to say about it.

This isn’t an article about defending a fee. This isn’t an article responding to whatever a few recruiters told the press. This is my unfiltered take on why the fees the best firms are paying have continued to rise, why that trend is going to accelerate and why anyone reading the 16% headline as “recruiters got greedy” is missing the actual story of where this industry is heading.

Related:The Old Recruiting Playbook Is Losing to Culture, Optionality and Ownership

The headline read like a story about recruiters cashing in. It isn’t. It’s a story about what advisor assets are worth in 2026, what it actually takes to get those assets to the right home and why the best firms in this industry—AMPF, Raymond James, LPL and a handful of others—have finally decided to price this work for what it is rather than what the market used to assume it was.

I’ll say plainly what most people in this business won’t: The firms paying at the top of the market are not overpaying. They are paying correctly, for the first time in a long time, and the rest of the industry is going to have to catch up to that reality.

Here’s the bigger story.

1. Advisor assets have never been more strategically valuable than they are right now.

Organic growth has slowed across the entire industry. Every major firm: wirehouse, regional, independent broker/dealer, RIA aggregator, hybrid, is fighting for the same finite pool of high-quality, growth-oriented advisors. Ameriprise’s most recent results tell the story plainly: average revenue per advisor north of $1 million, and advice and wealth management revenue up 16% year-over-year. That growth doesn’t come from waiting for advisors to walk in the door. It comes from winning the recruiting war and winning it with the right people.

Related:The Diamond Podcast for Financial Advisors: Annual Report on Recruiting, Deals, and Transitions

When a quality advisor brings $300,000 to $2 million-plus of trailing GDC and seven, eight, or nine figures in client assets — and stays for 15 years—the math on a one-time placement fee is not a cost. It is one of the highest-ROI investments any firm makes. The firms paying at the top of the market understand this. The firms still trying to do this on the cheap don’t, and they’re losing the war for talent because of it.

And here’s the part of the math nobody is willing to put on the page. Valuation multiples for advisor practices have climbed sharply over the past decade. Quality wealth management practices regularly trade at 8x to 12x EBITDA, and the best practices command meaningfully more. The firms recruiting these advisors capture the full compounding upside—ongoing revenue, asset growth, enterprise value appreciation, and the strategic optionality those assets unlock over a 15- to 20-year horizon. The transition and business consultants who deliver those practices to the right home capture a one-time fee on a fraction of year-one production. Even at 16%, the firms paying at the top of the market are capturing a small share of the long-term value being transferred. If you ran the math honestly, the case can be made—and, frankly, should be made—that the best transition and business consultants are still underpaid relative to the practices they deliver.

Related:Advisor Movement Soared 16% in 2025

2. The choice landscape didn’t just expand. It exploded.

Twenty years ago, an advisor evaluating a move had four or five real options. Today, between W-2 firms, independent broker/dealers, hybrid platforms, supported independence channels, RIA aggregators, custodial RIAs and tuck-in opportunities, an advisor has hundreds of viable destinations to consider—each with its own economics, payout grid, deal structure, technology stack, compliance framework, succession path, deferred compensation design, non-compete language and cultural fit.

Layer on seven-to-12-year deferred comp packages, AMPF stock vesting schedules, forgivable note math, garden leave provisions, ADV implications and the protocol-vs-non-protocol question, and an advisor isn’t making a recruiting decision anymore. They’re making a multi-year financial, legal, operational and family decision that will define the next chapter of their career—and done wrong, could undo everything they’ve built.

This is exactly where the work of a real transition and business consultant becomes irreplaceable.

3. Our job is to make a complex process simpler and protect the advisor’s most expensive assets: their time, their bandwidth, their judgment and their confidentiality.

When an advisor tries to navigate this market alone, three things happen, none of them good. They burn months of time talking to dozens of firms that were never the right fit—time that should have been spent growing their practice and serving their clients. They lose mental bandwidth filtering noise, which costs them real revenue inside their existing book. And they accumulate stress trying to evaluate offers, deal structures and platform fit at a level of detail nobody outside the inner circle of this industry has.

That’s the cost of getting this wrong. Wasted time is wasted money. Wasted bandwidth is wasted growth. And a wrong move—at this scale, with this much deferred compensation, with this much client and family disruption on the line—is something some advisors never fully recover from.

This is also the right place to call out something nobody in this industry is willing to talk about, but every senior advisor who has ever been shopped without their permission already knows. The “name-blasters”, what we at Elite call them, sales recruiters, who email an advisor’s information to a list of firms hoping somebody closes them, are not solving this problem. They are creating two of them.

First, they don’t do the work. They don’t understand the firms. They don’t know the advisor. They make introductions without context and pretend volume is a strategy.

Second, and this is the part the industry has been far too polite to address, they routinely put an advisor’s confidentiality at risk. They spread an advisor’s name across multiple firms, often without that advisor’s explicit permission, hoping enough interest will be generated for someone to close a deal. That is professionally negligent. In any other industry, it would be disqualifying. An advisor’s name, their book, their intent to move — those are confidential assets that belong to the advisor, not to a sales recruiter to spray across the market for their own benefit. The reputational risk, the political risk inside the advisor’s current firm, the risk to client relationships if the move becomes public prematurely — none of that is taken seriously by people whose business model depends on volume of names rather than quality of placements.

And—let me say this clearly, because somebody in this industry has to—a job board doesn’t solve this either. Neither does ChatGPT, Claude or any AI tool.

AI can summarize the headline grid at LPL. AI can describe the AMPF franchisee model. What AI cannot do is the part that actually matters: match an advisor’s personality, vision, goals, family priorities and emotional readiness to the firm, leadership and culture where they will thrive.

The right move is never the one with the best deal sheet on paper. It’s the one where the advisor, their team, and their clients fit—where the firm’s leadership style matches the advisor’s temperament, where the platform supports the advisor’s long-term vision, where the day-to-day operating environment lines up with how the advisor actually wants to live and work for the next 10 years.

That match cannot be made by a database. It cannot be made by a summary. It cannot be made by an AI prompt. It is made by a consultant who knows the advisor as a person—their drivers, their fears, their goals, what they’re running toward and what they’re running from—and who knows the firms as cultures, not as logos.

A job board is a list. An AI is a summary. A sales recruiter is a name-blaster. Real consulting is judgment, relationship, discretion and human understanding. And those only come from experience.

4. The best firms pay the most because they understand they’re paying for retention, not placement.

When firms like AMPF, Raymond James and LPL write checks at the top of the market, anywhere from 12% to 16% of an advisor’s annual production, they are not paying for an introduction. They are paying for:

Cheap recruiting produces churn. Churn is the single most expensive thing in this industry. And the firms paying at the top of the market have figured out that paying a premium to the Consultants doing this work the right way is dramatically cheaper than paying to replace advisors who never should have been placed in the first place.

5. This is exactly how quality advisory practices price themselves, and nobody apologizes for it.

A great advisor charging 1% on a $5 million household doesn’t discount because somebody else will do it for half. They charge what their fiduciary judgment, expertise and outcomes are worth. The client who values that is the right client. The client looking for the cheapest option was never going to be a long-term fit anyway.

The exact same principle applies on our side of the table. Elite Consulting Partners has spent years building the infrastructure, data, legal expertise, financial modeling capability, deferred comp benchmarking and depth of relationships across every platform in this industry. We are not commoditized recruiters. We are not sales recruiters. We are transition and business consultants operating at an institutional level, and the firms writing checks at the top of the grid understand the difference, even if the rest of the market is still catching up.

And here’s the part that matters most and the part our advisors know better than anyone else: our advisor-first approach is not driven by our fee.

In any given year, Elite moves close to 200 unique advisors. A meaningful share of these moves go to firms that are not at the top end of our pay range, and some go to firms well below it. We make those moves because that firm was the right fit for that advisor, their team, their clients and their family. We make the move that’s right for the advisor every time, regardless of what it pays us.

That is the same standard a great advisor holds themselves to with their own clients. A real fiduciary doesn’t pick an investment because it pays a higher commission. They pick it because it’s the right investment for the client. We operate the exact same way. The advisors who have worked with us know it. The firms that have worked with us long enough know it. And the data—across hundreds of placements every year—proves it.

6. The real impact of this work is something no fee schedule will ever capture.

When this work is done right, an advisor lands at the firm that fits their practice, their clients, their family and the next 10 years of their career. Their book grows. Their clients are better served. Their team is more stable. Their enterprise value compounds. Their life gets simpler, not more complicated. Their reputation is protected. Their confidentiality is protected.

That outcome—across an advisor’s career, across their clients’ financial lives, across their family’s future—is priceless.

The fee is not the story. The outcome is the story.

At Elite Consulting Partners, we will continue to be paid at the top of the market by the firms paying at the top of the market. Not because we ask for it. Because the work we do, the rigor we apply, the relationships we’ve built over decades, and the results we deliver justify it. We will also continue to place advisors at firms that pay us less when those firms are the right fit, because that is the entire point of doing this work the right way.

The best firms in this industry have figured that out. The advisors who have worked with us have figured that out. And the data—placement quality, retention rates, advisor satisfaction, post-transition growth—keeps proving it.

The 16% high-water mark isn’t a story about recruiters cashing in. It’s a story about the most sophisticated firms in this industry recognizing that the best transition and business consultants protect everyone in the transaction—the firm, the advisor, the clients, the staff and the entire ecosystem on which this industry depends.

We’re publishing a full white paper on this in the coming weeks: The Economics of Advisor Transition — Why Quality Costs More, and Why the Best Firms Are Right to Pay for It.

If you’re an advisor evaluating a move, or a firm rethinking how you recruit, that paper is for you.

All estate-planning attorneys and wealth advisors with clients who live in a state with a state estate tax should be aware of the state-only qualified terminable interest property (QTIP) election. When reviewing existing estate plans or helping clients in these states implement a new one, practitioners should understand whether and to what extent language permitting this election is included to manage or prevent state estate tax from being due at the first spouse’s death. The decoupling of state estate taxes from the federal estate tax regime has introduced a host of planning challenges and opportunities for married couples. The state-only QTIP election is one of the most important and nuanced tools to address the challenge. I’ll examine…

Spousal lifetime access trusts (SLATs) allow married couples to make substantial lifetime gifts while maintaining limited access to and control over transferred assets. Each spouse, as grantor, creates a trust for the benefit of their spouse, children and future generations. The non-grantor spouse may be a current discretionary beneficiary of the SLAT or be added later (access) and may, subject to appropriate safeguards, serve as a co-trustee (control) along with an independent trustee. In many cases, clients will never need access to SLAT assets, so an essential benefit of dual SLATs is the security they provide in ensuring access if needed.

The grantor trust rules in Internal Revenue Code Sections 671 to 679 establish the extent to whic…