For married couples who want to move wealth out of their estate but worry about giving up access to it, there’s a structure designed almost precisely for that tension: the spousal lifetime access trust, or SLAT.

The idea is elegant. One spouse creates an irrevocable trust and makes a gift to it, removing those assets — and their future growth — from the couple’s taxable estate. But because the other spouse is a beneficiary, the family can still indirectly benefit from the trust during that spouse’s lifetime. You get the estate-tax benefit of having given the assets away, while preserving a measure of access most families find reassuring.

With the federal exemption now permanently at $15 million per person, the urgency that once drove couples to rush into trusts like this has eased — but SLATs remain compelling for families who expect significant future growth, who face state estate taxes, or who simply want to lock in today’s exemption with assets they’re comfortable parting with. The growth that happens inside the trust is the real prize: it compounds outside the estate.

SLATs do come with cautions that have to be respected. The two spouses’ trusts can’t be too similar, or the IRS may unwind the benefit under the reciprocal trust doctrine. And the access runs through the beneficiary spouse — so divorce, or that spouse’s death, changes the picture. These are real considerations, not reasons to avoid the strategy, but they demand careful design.

Your attorney drafts the SLAT and navigates those rules; my role is to decide which assets fund it, manage them with that long compounding horizon in mind, and integrate the trust into the family’s overall plan. Helping a family move wealth out of the estate without feeling that they’ve lost all access to it is exactly the kind of work I do alongside your estate counsel.

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The financial professionals associated with Pence Financial Group are registered with, and securities and advisory services are offered through LPL Financial, a registered investment advisor, Member FINRA/ SIPC. Content in this material is for general information only and not intended to provide specific advice or recommendations for any individual. Pence Financial Group and LPL Financial do not offer tax or legal advice or services.