Why Gifting Wealth From a $2M–$8M Portfolio May Be Simpler Than You Think
Episode 38
Why Gifting Wealth From a $2M–$8M Portfolio May Be Simpler Than You Think
Published on June 10th, 2026
Episode Summary
Episode 38 of Retirement Tax Matters examines the common misunderstandings and anxieties high-net-worth parents face when gifting money to adult children. For retirees with a portfolio in the $2M–$8M range, the federal gift tax framework under the One Big Beautiful Bill Act provides an individual lifetime exemption of $15 million ($30M for married couples), removing the tax penalty from early wealth transfers for the vast majority of affluent families. While the 2026 annual exclusion limit (different than the lifetime exexmption!) is capped at $19,000 per recipient, some retirees find filing a Form 709 gift tax return with their tax preparer is all that is required to report the excess transfer and reduce their lifetime exemption footprint. This episode details the tactical funding choices between using cash, Traditional IRA distributions, or appreciated stock, illustrating why liquid bank accounts or taxable brokerage assets are sometimes more efficient than triggering an immediate ordinary income tax drag by distributing pre-tax assets. The conversation also clarifies how state lines complicate legacy planning, showing how lifetime giving can systematically reduce a taxable estate in regions with estate tax exemptions far below the federal threshold. By running proactive income tax projections, families gain the data-driven confidence to implement multi-account distributions safely, ensuring their own financial security remains protected while their children enjoy the benefits of their generosity.
Key Tax Planning Questions
Question 1: Will my kids have to pay tax on cash gifts I give them?
When you write a $50,000 check to help your adult children, the recipient does not pay tax on those gifted dollars. In 2026, the individual annual gift tax exclusion threshold is capped at $19,000 per recipient. By making a $50,000 transfer to one child, you will exceed this limit by $31,000. This requires your tax preparer to file Form 709 gift tax return alongside your standard Federal 1040 to report the excess to the federal government.
Filing this form does not mean you owe an out-of-pocket tax bill. Under the guidelines of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, every individual is granted a lifetime gift and estate tax exemption of $15 million. Reporting your $31,000 excess transfer subtracts from your lifetime bucket, leaving you with a remaining exemption limit of $14,969,000. For savers within the $2M–$8M net worth range, moving past the $19,000 annual exclusion boundary is usually just a reporting requirement rather than a financial penalty because your total estate value rests comfortably below the lifetime threshold. (Note: this is obviously very dependent on your specific situation. Owning $8 million at age 55 while you are still working and earning a high income makes reaching that $15 million lifetime limit a real consideration, whereas a $6 million 80-year-old couple spending down their assets and giving away their growth will likely never have to worry about it.)
The vital piece to remember is that while your child doesn't pay income tax on the gift, you are still entirely responsible for the taxes required to generate that cash. If you have to withdraw roughly $64,000 from your Traditional IRA and withhold 22% for federal taxes just to net out the $50,000 check for your child, you are responsible for declaring that full $64,000 withdrawal as taxable income on your return. Your child gets to avoid the taxes, but you will see that 1099-R report the taxable distribution the following spring when tax forms are delivered to your inbox. At this point, a lot of my clients ask if there is any way to structure the gift like a charity to get a tax deduction. As much as you might feel like your adult child is a total charity case, that doesn't change their status in the eyes of the IRS.
If you are married and want to keep your lifetime exemption completely untouched and avoid filing Form 709 altogether, you can utilize simple spousal gifting rules to change the math. You can write a check to your child for $19,000, and your spouse can write a separate check from their own account for another $19,000, allowing you to pass a total of $38,000 this year without reporting a thing. If your child is married, you can double that strategy by writing separate checks to their spouse as well. Even if you are single or choose to write the full $50,000 check yourself, one parent can gift their standard $19,000 exemption while the other spouse covers the remaining $31,000. In that scenario, only the spouse who went over their personal limit has to file the Form 709 to report their $12,000 excess.
Question 2: Is it better to give to my kids now or at our death?
Determining whether to transfer wealth to your children during your lifetime or preserve it for an inheritance is a challenge that can only be partially solved with a calculator. The right decision depends heavily on your unique financial timeline and how you balance personal security against an unknowable future. I have sat down with clients who possess an abundance of assets, only to be surprised by their underlying feeling of financial insecurity. Some savers are naturally wired to prepare for every worst-case scenario, which can freeze their ability to enjoy their wealth, while others look at their portfolio and feel immediate confidence to spend and distribute their savings freely. If your personal margin for error feels tight, you may lack the flexibility to gift capital today, regardless of how compelling the tax advantages appear for your retirement.
However, if your financial planning projections reveal a situation of abundance, lifetime giving can offer profound psychological that an estate plan cannot replicate at death. From a human perspective, being alive to witness the real-world impact of your generosity by funding a grandchild's education, helping a child secure their first home, or stepping in to absorb a heavy family expense can carry a human value that no spreadsheet can quantify. Furthermore, the financial concept of the time value of money works heavily in your family's favor when executing early transfers. Financial assets deployed to children in their 30s or 40s often carries a significantly higher value, allowing them to dodge high-interest debt, invest early, and establish a foundational compounding runway for their own households.
On a technical planning level, you must navigate the trade-offs between lifetime gifting and waiting for gifts to happen after you die. Gifting highly appreciated assets like individual stocks out of a taxable brokerage account during your lifetime forces your children to assume your cost basis. This means if they sell those securities, they will likely have to pay federal taxes on the realized capital gains. On the other hand, holding those specific appreciated assets inside your personal estate until passing helps your heirs receive a step-up in basis to the fair market value, legally erasing decades of capital gains built up over multiple years. If you are in your late 70s or 80s with a concentrated, low-basis stock portfolio, it is usually more efficient to preserve those specific assets for your estate plan and choose other financial assets for your current family gifting strategies instead.
Finally, many well-meaning savers add an adult child directly to a primary checking or brokerage account for convenience, completely unaware that the IRS views this action as a immediate completed gift of a percentage of that asset. This mistake strips the child of the full step-up in basis at your passing and introduces immediate exposure to the child's potential creditors or domestic legal issues. To preserve your lifetime flexibility while insulating your family from unexpected tax exposure, you should keep your asset titles strictly in your own name and utilize a clean Transfer on Death designation to automate the inheritance process, allowing your lifetime giving strategies to remain focused on explicit, intended milestones.
This is where having a good estate planning attorney and financial planner on your team can be a really valuable asset.
Full Episode Transcript
Adam: Good morning, and welcome to Retirement Tax Matters. I'm Adam Reed. This is Garrett Crawford, our resident CFP® professional. How are we doing this morning, Garrett?
Garrett: Well, ready to do another episode and give the people what they want. I think they're all gathered and we're here to deliver this morning, Adam, once again.
Adam: Wednesday morning, people all across the country are chomping at the bit and waiting for the release of the episode.
Garrett: I like to imagine, as a kid I was into the Batman shows, that they're raising up the Retirement Tax Matters light. There's another issue that needs solving today, and we're here to bring it to the people.
Adam: What's funny is, here in a couple of weeks, I'm going down to Texas to visit some family. They live in and around The Woodlands, and I think that's a spot we've heard from some people. I was telling Garrett, and he said, 'Man, people may be stopping you in the street asking for photographs or autographs and stuff.' I said, 'I didn't think about that. I'll have to wear some dark sunglasses and a scarf down in Texas in the middle of June to hide my identity.'
Garrett: Garrett, I've dehydrated down in Texas. Please come help.
Adam: The scarf got to me. Well, hey, I think today's topic is a really cool one because it's somewhat technical, but it's kind of an easy one. It is more so clearing up some misunderstanding and some myths surrounding a topic that lands for a lot of people in this $2 million to $8 million space. Sometimes when people are below that threshold, they say, 'Hey, this is our money. We're trying to spend through it.' Sometimes above that threshold, things are getting a lot more complex with some of the tax issues and estate tax planning. But for a lot of people in this $2 million to $8 million space, I think what we're talking about today is going to make them say, 'Oh, that's great. I'm glad I know that now, and now I'm ready to execute moving forward.' So, not to bury the lead, but we're talking about gifting this morning. I think there's a lot of misunderstanding and maybe even some fear around gifting. When we talk to clients, we hear them say things like, 'Oh, I'd love to give some money to my kids, but I just don't want to get torn up by taxes,' or—
Garrett: Or tear my kids up with taxes.
Adam: Yeah, or, 'If I gift to my kids, it's just going to put them in a hole.' So I think clearing up some misunderstandings today and alleviating some of those fears will free people up. Everybody's wired differently, but I've heard more and more people talk about wanting to be generous to their kids and grandkids while they are still here because they want to see them enjoy it. They want to see them get a new roof put on their house, get into their first home, or pay for their college. They don't want to just leave them a big old wad of cash when they're gone where they say, 'Oh, thanks Grandma, thanks Grandpa,' and then forget all about them. They want to see them enjoy it. So, give me a rundown. What does gifting look like? What are some things people need to be aware of as they're thinking about giving to the next generation while they're still here?
Garrett: Yeah. A goal that I have with this episode is driven by the fact that I'm having this conversation with clients all the time. Actually, selfishly, I was like, 'Hey, if we record a podcast, maybe I can just forward this link to people and not go through the same thing over and over again for my clients out there.' We'll still talk about it, but—
Adam: We're going to get to the point where we've got an episode on everything, and clients can ask a question and we're just going to hit send. 'Episode 53, episode 104.'
Garrett: In a realistic way, that's really where we get a lot of these ideas. It's about what conversations and what questions clients are asking us all the time that we just need to put out there and provide a nuanced or targeted answer for retirees between $2 million and $8 million. This is one of those topics where people always say the tax code is complicated, but I feel like the messaging has just been bad. There are a lot of rules, and we won't get into everything, but I think for most of the people listening here, the landscape has changed whether you realize it or not. So let's just start with this. On July 4th, 2025, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act was passed. This story even goes back further than that, and it talks about this gift tax limit and estate tax limit. I remember when I came into the industry in 2013, the numbers we were using for when you would have to pay gift tax were somewhere between $5 million and $6 million per person. Coming into the industry, I was like, 'Man, people have $5 million? Wow, that must be like three people here in Knoxville.' But there were a lot of people who were subject to that. What has drastically changed in the past 12 to 13 years is that the federal estate and gift tax limit has shot through the roof. I think it went back to the 2018 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, but in 2026, you're allowed to give away $15 million per person. So that means, Adam, if you're married—if any of you all are married out there—you have a $30 million exemption before any of these rules come in. I don't want to go too far down that route right now, but just know that $15 million and $30 million are significantly above the threshold of the people we're talking to today who are between $2 million and $8 million. When I think about the niche of people who would be listening to this podcast, not all $2 million to $8 million portfolios are considered equal. You may have $8 million and you're 55, and that's where some of these issues become an issue. You may be 75 with $7 million, but you're planning on spending and giving all that away, so the idea of hitting $15 million probably isn't realistic.
But the most misunderstood conversation that I'm having with retirees a lot is this: 'I wanna give money to my kids, and people have told me I can give X amount of dollars per year and it won't cause any tax issues.' In the financial planning world, the estate planning world, and the tax planning world, we call that your annual gift tax exclusion amount. That number in 2026 is $19,000 per person. So again, there's already some confusion here because there's this $15 million number, and now we're back talking about this $19,000 number per person. The $19,000 is an amount that you can give away to anybody you want to, and as long as that gift is below $19,000 in 2026, you really just move on with your life and don't think about it again. If you give an amount above $19,000 to a kid, a family friend, or somebody else, that doesn't mean the gift becomes taxable. Instead, it means the amount over $19,000 then subtracts from your $15 million lifetime gift exemption amount. So let's say my name is Bob and I give my son $49,000. That is $20,000 above the $19,000 limit, which means for the rest of my life, I can give away $15 million minus $20,000. Almost everybody listening to this who is retired between $2 million and $8 million is not going to give away more than $15 million, and if you're married, you're not going to give away $30 million. So, it boils down to this: if you just want to forget everything I just said contextually, if you give a kid or a friend more than $19,000, the only thing you really need to worry about when you get to tax filing time is to remember to tell your tax preparer, your TurboTax, or whatever you're doing, 'Hey, I gave somebody $25,000 this year. Can you take care of that on my taxes?' They'll say, 'Yeah, sure, no problem.' They will add one extra tax form to your tax return called a Form 709, which is a gift tax return. That accountant or tax preparer is just going to say, 'Oh, you gave $25,000? We're going to remove $6,000 from your $15 million banked limit,' and you don't pay any more tax on that. So, again, if you're hearing this and you have $5 million and your plan is to spend through all of that, it actually means with just one extra form in your tax return, that is literally the implication here. You can give as much as you want, and we'll talk about that. Maybe if you know it's not that big of a deal, you might want to give more than $19,000.
Adam: Hopefully this brings clarity here and not more confusion, but it's $19,000 per spouse, per person that you're giving to. I guess an example is that I have one brother, and my parents are both still living and married. If they decided they wanted to give $38,000 to me and $38,000 to my brother—Mom, Dad, if you're watching, we'd love that, and you can do more too—they can do that without any forms or anything. I think that's why this rule gets so confusing, because one person says, 'Oh, you can give $19,000.' Well, if you're married, it's actually $38,000. If you have multiple kids, it's $38,000 per kid. It just becomes one of those areas where the flowchart has a lot of different directions it can go. But it is $19,000 per spouse, from the family that's gifting, to each person they're gifting to.
Garrett: Yeah. A married couple giving to married kids can give $76,000 to them before it goes into that $15 million limit. So you can give away a lot of money, and I feel like this is one of those conversations where if you have $12 million and you're single, okay, we need to start talking about whether you are going to use all that and what it's going to grow to. If you have $6 million and you're planning on spending and retaining principal, you can probably give away a significant amount and not have an issue.
Adam: It's funny, even as we talk about it, I realize that while it's not completely confusing, if you hear your buddy talking about it on the golf course, I can understand why there is some muddy water and haziness around it. Feel free to throw your thoughts or experiences down in the comments, like, 'Hey, this is how I've done it in the past.' It's always nice to hear from other people. Maybe another important topic is where to give from. A lot of the people we're working with have an IRA, maybe some Roth, a joint account, a brokerage account, an individual account, and then maybe cash or high-yield savings. Where should they be giving from, what is the most efficient way, and are there any places where it's like, 'Oh my goodness, do not give from there'?
Garrett: Hovering right back to the previous point to answer this, a concern that a lot of people have is whether they or their kids are going to get taxed if they give them $19,000 or $25,000. The answer is no. If you're giving them cash, the IRS doesn't care as much about cash because it's an easy asset to value. People who are really running afoul on tax returns are trying to give assets where there is subjective value to escape taxation. Cash is a really easy thing for the IRS to track. Children who receive a gift from you are not going to be taxed on that, and they don't have to report it on their tax return. On the donor side, people ask, 'Well, am I gonna get taxed on that money that I give away?' The answer is no, you're not going to get taxed on it directly. However, wherever you pull that money from to actually give the gift, you may end up getting taxed. If you have $25,000 sitting in cash and you want to give that to a kid, or maybe you have $100,000 that you want to give to a kid—the most common thing right now we're seeing is that houses are expensive, parents have seen their portfolios grow, and they want to give them money for a down payment—if you have cash in a checking account, you're not going to get taxed on that and your kids aren't going to get taxed on that. That's very simple. If it's a $100,000 gift, you just need to report a Form 709 for the amount above $19,000 or $38,000, however you do it. But you will get taxed on that money if you're pulling it from a taxable source. Let's say you've got a $4 million IRA and you're pulling out $100,000. It wouldn't matter if it was a gift or not; if you pull $100,000 from the IRA, you're going to have to pay taxes on that IRA distribution, and your tax return is going to see that as additional income. But after you get the money out of the IRA, you don't get extra taxed just because you're giving it to a kid. So, regarding the best way to give assets or money to kids, cash is the easiest. Money in the bank account, checking account, or savings account is pretty straightforward. You write your kids a check, and they get it very easily. One asset that is probably not the greatest, especially depending on your age, would be a highly appreciated security. You might have heard something about donating or giving money to kids or charities through appreciated assets, but you're going to have to sell that security, which will generate a tax, and then you'll give that cash to the kids. If you're 88 and you bought Apple way back in the day and it has 10Xed its price, you might want to hold onto that until death so that the kids get a step-up in basis. That one is just a little bit more complicated, so I generally say cash. I think this is kind of an interesting scenario: let's say Mom wants to give a son $19,000, Mom wants to give a daughter-in-law $19,000, Husband wants to give a son $19,000, and Husband wants to give a daughter-in-law another $19,000. Instead of just writing one big check from a joint bank account, it's usually better to split those checks up. It kind of seems silly, but I think it's the cleanest way to do this. Refer to your tax person for final clarification, but you would want each spouse to sign that check for their portion of the gift if staying under your lifetime limit is a big deal. If not, and you have $6 million, who cares? You're not going to go through the $15 million or $30 million limit anyway. So I'd say cash is generally the best way to give.
Adam: This is a good time to pause and remind people of the year-end tax planning checklist that we have. As you're sitting down and looking at whether you want to give from your checking account, maybe you are actually in a really low tax bracket in your IRA and you have RMDs coming up, so you want to thin it out anyway. Maybe it does make sense to give from an IRA or something. What a great resource for whether it's gifting, RMDs, or Roth conversions. A lot of the people we talk to and a lot of the people in the comments are do-it-yourselfers, so you don't necessarily want to come sit down with Garrett and me, and that's perfectly fine. That's why we put together this year-end tax planning checklist for people like you to get more information, be educated, and learn the nuances and the hazy things to get clarity as you're planning for the year. Head to the website; it's down in the link below to check out the year-end tax planning checklist. You don't have to wait until the end of the year to do it. Honestly, most people should be doing it around this time. Start making that projection, then dial it in toward the end of the year. This year is flying by, and we're already almost to that point.
Garrett: They talk about the Continental Divide as the Rocky Mountains. My world history teacher in elementary school, hopefully I'm getting this right, but we're at that Continental Divide part of the year where we go from proactive planning to beginning to think about that fall execution already. We're there.
Adam: Absolutely, so check that out. Another thing that comes to mind—we took a week off from filming, so I'm a kind of scattered—is that we try to read all the comments and respond to people, and I think we've been doing a pretty good job of it. Somebody the other day said, 'Hey, I never hear anything on state tax.' They meant the 50 states that we live in, state taxes. The trick there is that we're trying to speak to a general audience, and everyone is dealing with the federal side of things. State taxes can be very nuanced, and there can be little things in one state that are very different than other states. We try not to get too into the weeds on that, but maybe give me a brief overview of how state taxes affect gifting. Hopefully, that person has stumbled into this video again and sees that we heard them and are covering state taxes today.
Garrett: Being transparent and honest is always best when it comes to being a planner; I think everybody should do this. I love tax planning, and I figured out quite a few years ago that taxes are one of the biggest difference-makers in retiree success and peace of mind. Great proactive tax planning is underutilized by retirees between $2 million and $8 million, and that's why we're doing this. It's been really interesting as we've done this podcast and had people reach out from all over the country. Adam and I are here from East Tennessee, Knoxville, Tennessee. The more that I do this and talk to people across the country, life seems much simpler when it comes to taxes in Tennessee because there is no state income tax. Adam and I are a little spoiled because a lot of our existing legacy clients come from the state of Tennessee. When we talk about Roth conversions, IRMAA, and getting money tax-efficiently out of accounts, we really don't have to think about state taxes at all. As I've interacted with people around the country, it's usually the people calling from states with really complicated state income taxes who are trying to figure this out. Transparently, what you'll see in different industries is that an attorney will be licensed in a specific state because state tax laws are so unique. I had a client recently working with an attorney here in Knoxville, and there was an issue in Texas. The attorney in Tennessee could not serve the person with their Texas issue, so we had to find another attorney and bring them on because the local attorney wasn't licensed in that state. The great challenge, especially for all you YouTube listeners and people watching this, when you ask why we never talk about state tax, the answer is because it's really hard to know how every state operates. I love this, but I can't know every single state. We have to pick and choose, and there are some states where a specialist would be really good, but then it becomes hard to find a specialist because they are all investment-driven. Part of our ground here is unique because we're willing to talk to people across state lines and dig into how state income tax works. A lot of times it feels really bad, but it may not actually be the biggest ingredient in the baked good that we're making. It is a factor, but it's not the dominating factor. If you live in New York City, you have extra taxes at the state level, the city level, and the federal level. A Roth conversion for our clients that is at 37% is going to hover more around the upper 40s for you just by the nature of where you live and the state tax restrictions regarding that. Long story short, bringing it back to this topic about gift tax, in most states, this still is not an issue. This whole $19,000 that you're giving away to different people is going to be something you're able to do at the state level too, where it's just not going to be a problem. There are a couple of outlier states; the one I came across was Connecticut. If you live in Connecticut, there is a limit, and I think it matches the federal tax level. Talk to your Connecticut specialist, but I think even in this $2 million to $8 million range, that's not going to be an issue. If you have $12 million and you're 50, maybe if you're in Connecticut, there's going to be an issue there, so ask more questions. To flip the conversation a little bit, if you're in a state like Washington, Oregon, or New York, where you have kind of low estate and gift tax exemptions that are far below the $15 million federal limit, the gift tax issue actually is a great way to insulate against that. If you're thinking about giving $100,000, it actually lowers your taxable estate so that those assets don't become subject to the lower state estate and gift tax levels. Giving away money can actually help in those situations to prevent a bigger state tax bill. This is one where you want a financial planner who knows the big picture but is also working in conjunction with the tax preparer. That's really our position when we're working with people. I don't feel the requirement that I have to be a CPA in every state; I can't be all things to all people, but I am really good at the federal tax level, and I can ask good questions to a tax preparer. I think that's really what people need in this space: a good financial planner who is willing to talk to the tax preparer about state taxes.
Adam: Absolutely. If people are thinking, 'Hey, I want to do this, I want to give some, but I'm also anxious about whether this is going to put us in a bind,' they want to give to their children rather than just leaving a lot later. But we know the psychology of people spending through their retirement is not always the most logical thing. We've had clients in the past who have plenty of money, but they are terrified to retire because they just don't feel it. How do you help somebody mathematically decide where this lands and what this looks like? The last thing to touch on is whether the geographical location of family affects giving at all. If you touch on those two things, I think we'll wrap it up for the day.
Garrett: The end of the episode is really kind of a commercial for what Adam and I do. You mentioned earlier there are a lot of DIY people out there watching this and wanting to learn, and the lead magnet is a great place to start. At the same time, there are a lot of people out there looking for somebody to trust to work with. It's very important, as much as we do this for educational content, that we also do it in a way that helps us find people who really resonate with the messaging we're giving and want good tax planning. Adam and I are financial planners, and we work with people and bring on clients. If you're interested in doing that, we have a website, and there's a 'Work With Us' button at the top of Retirement Tax Matters where you can actually schedule a meeting to talk to Adam and me about becoming a client. For some people, you have this down pat. You know that you can retire, you know how much money you have left in the budget to give to kids, and you can make all that happen. For a majority of people, you've saved well and have a lot of money accumulated, but you still have this uneasiness. You'd love to give to your children, charities, or friends, but you don't really feel that freedom because you're not a pro at it. You don't sit around thinking about how to build spreadsheets, how to make it last, and how to do it tax-efficiently. If you really pin it down, you're probably thinking, 'I have enough money, but let's hold off giving to the kids right now. If there's money left over at the end of our life, we'll transition some of it.' I think that strategy is totally fine. But I also think working with a financial planner allows us to do two things: we do the annual tax planning, which helps you know where your income is going to be at the end of the year so that if you do give $100,000 out of your IRA, maybe that doesn't get taxed at 35% because you had no idea. That will save you some money. The other part is this whole thing you just mentioned, Adam, about the psychology of spending, navigating the rigors of financial planning software, and making your estimates right. I feel like that's something we're really good at—helping people know, 'Yes, you can buy that boat that you've wanted,' or, 'Yes, you can afford that house on the lake that you've really wanted.' Alternatively, we can say, 'I know you'd love to upgrade, but that would really strain your budget. You can do what you want, but we would not recommend it.' Being a good financial planner is being a truth-teller.
Adam: It's always fun. I was just thinking of a client of ours whom you talked into buying an RV. It was a nice RV, and then they came in for their annual review and said, 'Wow, I thought we bought an RV, but we still have so much money.' We were like, 'Yeah, you've got plenty. You've done the hard part of saving, your portfolio is building, and compounding interest is doing a lot.' Those are the fun conversations for us.
Garrett: I would just tell people that a lot of people can do this themselves, but if you're thinking, 'Hey, it'd be nice to have somebody go all through this with me to help me know what I can and can't do,' admitting that you're not great at this is where our work really shines. I think we can help you. So again, gift tax and how much we can give in taxes is a very complicated topic with a lot of misinformation and misunderstanding. It's actually not that difficult for a majority of people, but how would you know unless you spend a lot of time reading, learning, and talking to people about it?
Adam: To boil it all down and land the plane here, each giver can give $19,000 to each recipient every year. If you go above that, it's a simple Form 709. Just let your tax preparer know, and they can put all that together for you. If you use TurboTax or something, it'll generate those forms if you let them know you made gifts this year.
Garrett: And for Adam's mom and dad, he's open for business.
Adam: You guys know where to find me. The grandkids love money too. But we appreciate you guys tuning in today. Again, it's kind of a hazy topic, but hopefully it brought some clarity for you guys. Hope you all have a great day today. My name's Adam Reed. This is Garrett Crawford. We're Retirement Tax Matters.