What are ILITs and Crummey Trusts?

What are ILITs and Crummey Trusts? You may have heard of these terms for various trusts before. They can be a bit of a pain to administer for beneficiaries and successor trustees, but they are powerful tools that can help ease tax pains later. In this podcast we explore how ILITs and Crummey Trusts differ from standard revocable trusts and when they might be useful when crafting an estate plan. We do enjoy history, so just a word of historical context. D. Clifford and Ethel E. Crummey created the trust that would immortalize their surname in 1962. It took six years for the IRS challenge to the trust to make it through the court system. But Mr. and Mrs. Crummey’s trust, as it turned out, was neither crummy nor crumby. And, though it was not an eyelet, it was an ILIT.