There is a particular kind of stress that can accompany wealth. The fear that a plan carefully assembled today will be dismantled tomorrow, by a changing tax code, a volatile market, an unexpected life event, or simply the passage of time. For decades, traditional estate planning offered a reassuring but ultimately insufficient answer to this.
That era is over.
Today’s most sophisticated estate plans are not static documents. They are adaptive and designed to protect wealth across generations while preserving a meaningful degree of control for the families who built it. At the center of this are specialized trust structures. Tools that were once reserved for the ultra-wealthy are now increasingly accessible.
Two structures in particular deserve serious attention: Spousal Lifetime Access Trusts and Directed Trusts. Together, they represent a different way of thinking about wealth transfer. One where tax efficiency and strategic flexibility are aligned.
Can You Remove Assets from Your Estate Without Losing Access to Them?
The Spousal Lifetime Access Trust, or SLAT, is one of the more elevated tools in modern estate planning and one of the most frequently misunderstood.
The core idea is that one spouse creates an irrevocable trust naming the other spouse as a beneficiary. Assets transferred into the trust are removed from the donor spouse’s taxable estate, potentially reducing estate tax exposure by millions. But because the beneficiary spouse can receive distributions, the donor spouse retains indirect access to those funds throughout the marriage.
You are not choosing between protecting your estate and maintaining access to your wealth. With a SLAT, you can pursue both.
Under current law, the federal lifetime gift tax exemption stands at historically elevated levels. Funding a SLAT now allows couples to lock in today’s generous exemption before that window closes.
Who Can Benefit Most From SLAT?
The ideal SLAT candidate is a married couple who wants to reduce their taxable estate aggressively but is not yet comfortable making an irrevocable gift with no strings attached. The SLAT threads that needle. It also offers a meaningful layer of asset protection. Assets held in a properly structured trust are generally shielded from future creditors, lawsuits, or unforeseen liabilities.
SLATs require careful design to avoid the “reciprocal trust doctrine,” where two mirror-image trusts created by each spouse for the other are collapsed by the IRS into a single, taxable arrangement. This is precisely where working with an experienced estate planning team makes the difference.
How Do Directed Trusts Give Wealthy Families More Control?
For high-net-worth families, one of the most persistent frustrations with traditional trust arrangements is that to get the legal and tax benefits of a corporate trustee, you often must hand over investment management to that institution. Your long-standing investment advisor, your family office, your carefully cultivated relationships, all potentially sidelined.
Directed trusts solve this problem by splitting the trustee’s duties into distinct roles.
An investment direction adviser, such as your family office or wealth manager, retains authority over investment decisions. A separate distribution adviser decides when and how beneficiaries receive funds. An administrative trustee, usually a corporate institution, manages compliance, record-keeping, and fiduciary liability. Each party focuses on their area of knowledge.
This structure offers the legal protection of a corporate trustee and the continuity of your established investment relationships. Maintaining flexibility and control is a meaningful benefit for many families.
What Are Dynasty Trusts, GRATs, and Charitable Trusts?
SLATs and Directed Trusts are important, but a complete estate planning toolkit includes several other instruments, each suited to specific goals and circumstances.
Dynasty Trusts
Designed to hold and grow wealth across multiple generations without triggering estate or generation-skipping transfer taxes at each generational transition. In favorable jurisdictions, these trusts can continue indefinitely.
Grantor Retained Annuity Trusts (GRATs)
Allow a grantor to transfer the appreciation of assets to heirs with minimal gift tax impact. Particularly effective in low-interest-rate environments or when transferring assets expected to appreciate significantly.
Charitable Lead Trusts
Provide income to a designated charity for a set period, after which the remaining assets pass to family beneficiaries, often with significant estate or gift tax savings.
Charitable Remainder Trusts
The inverse structure: provide income to the grantor or family members for a term, with the remainder passing to charity. Useful for balancing philanthropic goals with current income needs.
Each of these structures carries its own set of rules, tax implications, and design considerations. The question is, which combination of structures best reflects your family’s goals, timeline, and risk tolerance?
Why Design Matters as Much as Selection
Choosing the right trust structure is necessary. Designing it well is what separates a successful plan from one that creates problems down the road.
Life changes. Tax laws change. Relationships change. A plan built without flexibility will struggle to adapt. Specialized trusts, when properly designed, can accommodate changing circumstances. Whether that means adjusting distribution standards, shifting investment authority, or responding to new legislative realities.
Perhaps most importantly, these structures do not operate in isolation. A SLAT funded with the wrong assets, or a Directed Trust without a clear investment policy statement, creates friction rather than clarity. The best outcomes come from close coordination between the accountant, the estate attorney, and the wealth manager, each contributing their part to a unified strategy.
Our Role in Trust & Estate Planning
Estate attorneys draft the documents. Wealth managers select the investments. But the dedicated trust and estate planning accountant is often the most important voice in the room.
Tax consequences thread through every decision. Which assets to fund the trust with. How to characterize distributions. Whether grantor trust status is advantageous in a given situation. How to coordinate the trust structure with the client’s broader income tax picture. These shouldn’t be afterthoughts.
At MBE CPAs, our team understands these structures and can serve as the integrating layer. Translating complicated legal provisions into their real-world financial implications, identifying opportunities and risks that might otherwise be missed, and helping the plan work as intended.
Is your current plan keeping up? Estate plans designed even a few years ago may no longer be built for today’s environment. A focused review with an MBE CPAs advisor can reveal opportunities and gaps.