Burial insurance/plot

I'm pretty sure the answer is no.

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Yep when you occupy the plot you no longer pay taxes

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Yep when you occupy the plot you no longer pay taxes

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If only that were true......inheritance taxes.

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If only that were true......inheritance taxes

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I almost posted this 2 days ago. But there is a grey area. It's technically the heirs who pay.

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True, but it comes out of the dearly departed person's estate,which is what he accumulated before he assumed room temperature.

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Right. Even though he could have already paid taxes on it. Estate tax is my most hated tax ever.

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Right. Even though he could have already paid taxes on it. Estate tax is my most hated tax ever.

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Will never understand people who say this. I would much rather pay my taxes after I'm dead than when I'm alive -- seems like a no brainer. The widespread hatred of the estate tax is, I think, a triumph of marketing over rationality.

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Why should you have to pay taxes at all

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I mean, I would prefer not to. But here's the thing. Assuming that death & taxes are inviolable, we will have to pay some taxes in some form. Inheritance/estate/death taxes (whatever you want to call them) are the least distortionary tax, precisely because everyone is going to die and there's nothing you can do to avoid it. It also strikes me as the most fair tax because its incidence falls upon people who didn't really earn the money; i.e., the heirs. For that same reason it strikes me as a pro-meritocratic tax. As opposed to, say, the income tax, which punishes you for being a high earner, the estate tax just punishes you for being related to a high earner.

Obviously estate taxes aren't perfect, and I wouldn't suggest that the government be funded 100% by estate taxes. And Poodlebrain can probably talk more intelligently than I can. But I am quite convinced that the efficient amount of estate taxes is something other than zero (which is what it effectively is now).

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For lets just say a $100,000 gift upon someone's death. roughly how much would the heirs receive?

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$100,000. It has to be a fairly substantial estate for inheritance taxes to kick in.

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For lets just say a $100,000 gift upon someon'e death. roughly how much would the heirs receive?

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The heirs would receive 100%. The estate tax only applies to multimillionaires (unless Ala. has a state estate tax with a lower cutoff; a few states do, but I seriously doubt Ala. is one of them). Many people rail against the estate tax but don't realize it doesn't apply to them or anyone they know.

And for those multimillionaires, there are certainly some legal estate tax avoidance schemes which, again, Poodlebrain would be better off commenting on. Just as there are income tax avoidance schemes. One of the benefits of wealth is that it buys you better attorneys.

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Yeah, probably a good bet that it will not apply to me when that time comes.

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Well assuming you're not planning on dying right away, you really don't know what the cutoff will be when you do go. The estate tax cutoff jumped around a lot during the first decade of the 2000s, from somewhere around $1 million to $8 million, and (IIRC) there actually was no estate tax for a short time. No telling what Congress or the state leg's will do in the future.