Michael Gold Reveals How Lifetime Gifting Can Shrink a Taxable Estate

Most families that give money to their children stop at $19,000, the amount the IRS lets any individual hand to another person each year without paperwork or tax consequences. For a wealthy household, that habit can leave the two most powerful tools in estate planning untouched. Michael Gold has built much of his practice around closing that gap.

Michael Gold, based in Westport, Connecticut, works with entrepreneurs and multigenerational families who understand the annual gift but rarely use the lifetime exemption or the appreciated assets sitting inside their portfolios, both of which can move far more wealth out of a taxable estate than a yearly check ever will.

The Annual Exclusion Is Only the First Layer

Gold walks through the math using a couple he calls Scott and Amy in his forthcoming book, The Goldprint. The pair built a manufacturing business, sold it on favorable terms, and wanted to move money to two children and three grandchildren without paying a dollar more in tax than necessary. Using the annual exclusion alone, two parents gifting to five heirs at $19,000 each moved $190,000 out of their estate every year. Over a decade, that came to $1.9 million transferred completely tax-free, without touching either parent's lifetime exemption.

That is where most families stop. Gold's clients rarely do.

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Appreciated Stock Puts the Lifetime Exemption to Work

The federal government also allows each person to give away a far larger sum over a lifetime before any gift or estate tax applies. That number changed this year. The lifetime gift and estate tax exemption rose to $15 million per individual for 2026, or $30 million for a married couple, up from $13.99 million in 2025.

Amy went further than the annual exclusion in the Scott and Amy case, gifting $500,000 in appreciated stock to each child every year. The first $19,000 per child fell under the annual exclusion. The remaining $962,000 combined drew against her lifetime exemption. That produced $10 million in transfers over ten years, using $9.62 million of exemption and leaving room to spare under the current threshold.

The bigger number comes next. Had that $10 million stayed invested at an 8% average annual return, a realistic long-term assumption, it would grow to roughly $21.6 million after a decade. The stock was already gifted, so that entire $21.6 million sits outside the taxable estate. It never touches the 40% federal estate tax that would otherwise apply. Gold writes in The Goldprint that removing an asset today is only half the strategy. The real advantage is removing every dollar that asset would have earned for the rest of a person's life.

Family Limited Partnerships Add Another Layer

Families with concentrated business interests or real estate often go one step further with a Family Limited Partnership, a structure that can apply valuation discounts for lack of control and lack of marketability to interests gifted to heirs. Combined with the annual exclusion and lifetime exemption, an FLP can let a family move more underlying wealth than the exemption dollars alone would suggest.

Gold is candid about the risk of treating any of this as a do-it-yourself project. “The ways in which these strategies are used, and how they are combined, is a complex undertaking requiring genuine sophistication,” he writes in The Goldprint.

Preparing Heirs Before the Wealth Arrives

Michael Gold's white paper, Radical Ownership, co-authored with Jerry D. Prince, draws a sharp line between two types of business owners. The reactive owner says, “The kids will figure it out.” The Radical Owner says, “I'm preparing the next generation before responsibility arrives.” Gold treats lifetime gifting as the financial expression of that second mindset. Wealth moves while it is still growing, not after it has already grown into a larger tax bill.

Congress made the higher $15 million exemption permanent under the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. The amount will now adjust for inflation every year going forward, and the sunset that once loomed over this kind of planning is gone. That permanence does not remove the case for acting sooner. Every year a gift is delayed is a year of growth that stays inside the estate instead of outside it.

For Westport families weighing whether to start, Gold's advice does not center on urgency created by the tax code. It centers on the math of compounding, and on making sure a family's plan can hold up under the kind of scrutiny that only comes from experience. “Only with a holistic assessment of your specific situation by truly knowledgeable wealth advisors can you maximize your savings while protecting your estate,” he writes.

Investment advisory services offered through CWM, LLC, an SEC Registered Investment Advisor.

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