I don’t know why stuff like this keeps me up at night but let’s pretend you just won some obscene amount and there’s a lot of people you’d like to set up for life. Let’s say after taxes you have $300m in your account
You can give someone up to 18k a year without incurring a gift tax and while that’d definitely be a nice bump to their income, you still have way more money than you know what to do with. So what’s the smartest way to hook them up?
A couple of options I’ve considered are:
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Give them a lump sum of $X million. They eat the taxes the first year and handle the savings themselves.
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Create a company and hire them to “work” one hour a month for a big salary. If you put $25m in an account, the interest covers the salary. They get a steady bonus income with the added bonus of getting the best insurance available. Is that legal?
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Set up a “shared” checking account they can use to pay for…whatever. But would these expenses count towards the gift tax? I do not know.
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Buy houses and let them live there rent-free. I don’t really like this one because I don’t want to be a lord to my friends and family.
For the record, I did not win the lottery. I don’t even play it. I’m just working out the details in a fantasy world for some reason
Ok, first of all, rich people don’t pay taxes. If you paid taxes, you ain’t rich. You’re at best a parvenu upper middle class.
Secondly, the current best way to give them money freely is to become a major investor of a company, make your friend the CEO, pay them in stock options, push the company to focus on making profit at all costs to raise stock prices and then have both you and your friend pull out right before it all comes crumbling down.
Or so it seems to go in the US at least.
Set up a trust for friends and a trust for family for things like education, house, car, emergency expenses
Don’t try to cheat the government. make sure you can say either you reported the large gift for tax purposes or the total is under 18k., if you must cheat you can take them on vecation and they use your gear for free but the plane ticket, meals and anything that could look like a gift is under the limit.
tax fraud is something the irs takes serously and you never know when they look. Plus you are not sympathetic to a jury so prison is likely for you.
if you give anyone more than 10k in a year (well under the limit) have your accountant deliver it all so there is plenty of evidence that you are not cheating. If you want to give over 18k have your accountant figure out how to do withholding so you friends don’t have a tax surprise.
What about shared credit cards?
same thing, they are lakely to audit them and see if they are being used to cheat. You can use them but either count everything as a gift or have good records that whatever isn’t a going to whoever.
Coincidentally, for no real reason I ponder this sort of stuff too! But I’m much more pessimistic about the outcomes haha.
The real answer to this stuff would be to find a financial advisor, I suspect setting up a trust and giving out x amount of money per year is the most sane approach.
re: your options
Give them a lump sum of $X million. They eat the taxes the first year and handle the savings themselves.
Keep in mind people tend to be terrible with money/finance. And also keep in mind you cannot force people to do what you think they should do with their money.
There will be a good percentage of people that will neglect any advice about keeping that $$ for taxes & such and will come back to you in a year asking for more $$ to cover the the taxes and expenses that they are facing - after all you were the one that put them in that position.
The other percentage of people will have remembered to keep some $$ to cover taxes but will likely still bankrupt themselves in the next few years - they too will come back to you asking for more $$ because, well none of that would have happened without you starting it all.
Hopefully you’ll have a few people that didn’t blow it all & maybe invested it, or at least paid off their bills and mortgages.
Create a company and hire them to “work” one hour a month for a big salary. If you put $25m in an account, the interest covers the salary. They get a steady bonus income with the added bonus of getting the best insurance available. Is that legal?
Not sure on the legality, I guess you’re essentially creating some sort of shell company? Keep in mind both the company and the “employees” will be facing taxes. Those “employees” are going to end up in entirely new tax brackets depending how high you bumped their yearly incomes.
On the upside they would be paying way, way more into social security so at least they’ll end up with a bit more coming back in their later years if social security still exists. And you could maybe do things like auto-enroll them into a 401k and invest that into retirement savings… as long as each “employee” doesn’t somehow screw that up since each 401k account is technically their own and you can’t force your will on people to do things with their own money.
Set up a “shared” checking account they can use to pay for…whatever. But would these expenses count towards the gift tax? I do not know.
Not sure on that one but I suspect that’s just another version of gift tax like you said. You’d better talk to a financial advisor.
Buy houses and let them live there rent-free. I don’t really like this one because I don’t want to be a lord to my friends and family.
The smart ones will immediately sell, even if they sell at a loss they’ll make free money. The less smart ones will come back to you ever few years when something needs to be done with the house, it’s very possible many of those people will be living in houses they can’t actually afford to maintain and upkeep and you put them in that situation in the first place…
Yeah I kind of hate the lump sum option for that reason. I’m confident most of them would handle it fine but I’m POSITIVE that a few would blow it all in a year on dumb shit.
I think the company thing is the best option even if it bumps their tax bracket - they’d only pay the higher taxes on part of it and any deductions they might be getting by being in a lower bracket would be more than made up for.
As for the house thing, they couldn’t sell - I’d own the house! But like I said, I don’t want to be a landlord to my friends. The only type of landlording I’d do is build (GOOD QUALITY) homes and rent them to domestic abuse victims for pennies. My cousin is very involved in that sphere and I’d love to help them out - though I’d probably ask her to handle the landlord part of it (for a nice salary, of course)
The company plan is just a trust fund with extra tax / steps. Do one of those instead. Set it up so they get a weekly check if they’re really bad with money and then call it a day.
- Create a company and hire them to “work” one hour a month for a big salary. If you put $25m in an account, the interest covers the salary. They get a steady bonus income with the added bonus of getting the best insurance available. Is that legal?
i think this describes at least a few production companies/celebrities like happy madison. those guys are just having fun and gettin paid
But they DO something and my theoretical company would do nothing.
I wouldn’t want to work anymore so I’m not interested in actually running a company. I’d just “invest” in companies doing things I like. Quotes there because I wouldn’t be looking for a financial return on that investment
I would think option 2 HAS TO be legal, except, you gotta modify it slightly. You don’t claim they work one hour per month. You pay them a yearly salary. And their job is to “entertain you”. Essentially you’re just paying your friends to hang out, for an unspecified amount of time every year. Which in practical terms is just you giving your friends a paycheck for the sake of giving your friends a paycheck, and sometimes you hang out. I swear to god, this HAS TO BE the basis of Adam Sandlers whole career. He makes movies where he just happens to always hang out with his friends, and somehow other people enjoy the movies too. But mostly it’s him hanging out with his friends.
Option 4 could work too. But here’s what you do. You hire a landlord. You tell that landlord "Anything they want done, you’re in charge of getting it done. ASAP. I don’t want to hear one peep out of them not getting whatever fixed. That way, they think of the landlord as the landlord, and you as just that friend they have who happens to own the houses they live in rent free. But they don’t think of you as having power over them. That’s what the landlord manager is for.
You could also buy an old hotel, fix it up, and have it serve as a homeless person shelter. I mean, this doesn’t have anything to do with your question, but if we’re just throwing money around, why not?
I’ve wondered the same. I previously planned (if i won the big lottery) to set up a $1 million trust with the idea that my work department could take 4% per year to purchase equipment. I returned to work at the end of the summer this week to find that the idiots who are now in charge threw away over $10k worth of stuff that i (and a bunch of school kids) need. Those fuckers aren’t getting shit now and i hope i win just so i can buy my whole team into retirement and leave the fuckers totally fucked!
Back to the topic - i wonder about setting up some type of grant program. Maybe, as you mentioned, paying things for them instead of giving cash? Do you pay tax when you get a home through habitat for humanity? Can i pay for someone else’s health insurance or fill their hsa account? Maybe a scholarship for their kids? Most people i know would be pretty happy to have $18k each year dropped into their retirement accounts.
Did a little research. You want to be in one of the 9 states that doesn’t tax in lottery winnings. Fed will take 24% immediately and you’ll pay the remaining 13% when you file taxes. The $18k gift tax limit is to and from per person. If the giver and recipient are both married, each giver can give each recipient $18k, so $72k per year from one married couple to another. Still trying to figure out the trust situation.
Statistically u will be broke or murdered so best off putting it all in monero and sending it to me. Trust me i can spend it better.
Re:4:
Make them sign leases that they can terminate at any time, but you cannot. Set the rent at $1 a month. Duration 10 years.
Congrats, you have given away wealth without taxesThe courts will see right through that and make your friends pay taxes on what they consider reasonable rent. You just hope there is no audit.
Oh that’d be good! It would avoid them feeling like they have to be artificially nice to me.
My dream situation is to buy some land, split it into smaller plots, and let my friends design their perfect home (within reason). Most of us live pretty far from each other now… I’d love to be within walking distance again
Tell your friends they can charge your credit card once a month for “escort service”.
Depending on where they live, maybe they should open up a business in order to do it legally correct.
I would set up a trust that automatically paid them out periodically. I would start with a relatively low amount, to see if money turned any of them into assholes, and if not I would turn it up. but, don’t tell them that’s what you’re doing. firstly it won’t work if they know you’re watching, secondly, using money to control your friend’s behavior is weird, which is why I don’t like the idea of making them work for it either. you didn’t work for it
That seems a bit too secretive for me…both because I would immediately start building a nice house and like you implied, playing puppetmaster like that feels shady.
If the “making them work for it” was in relation to my 1-hour a month salaried position, let me be clear that they wouldn’t actually have to do any work. It’d just be to have a number on paper.
you’re not puppeting anything. you aren’t controlling their behavior if they don’t know that there is a reward. I just want to avoid creating any entitled monsters
I have no answer for this, but it reminded me of this old comment on Reddit.
Now this was interesting to read through. I guess that’s what money does with us.
hand them cash
I say to hell with the older folks, the math doesn’t check out.
Gift the 18k to each new baby born in the family, have it invested into a large growth fund. Another option would be to have the baby on payroll and make sure ROTH is maxed out.
18k invested for 60 years with a compounding interest rate of roughly 12.4% goes a long way. That’s just a one time payment.
Everyone I’d be giving money to either is done having kids or doesn’t plan on having more. So it’ll be a full a decade or two before any new baby.
Plus, as much as I like the kids, they aren’t my friends! I want my current friends to benefit. Why do you say the math doesn’t check out?
I’m more of a compounding interest person when I think about these things. It’s easier to figure with the young.
True, but that wouldn’t help my friends much aside from not having to save for college
You don’t. You go off the grid. Live with that money.
