In the Academy Award winning movie Moonstruck, there is a scene in which Olympia Dukakis is sitting in her living room, waiting for her husband to come home. For several days she has been quizzing everyone she knows as to why a man cheats on his wife. She finally gets an answer from her daughter’s fiancee. Men cheat, he says, because they are afraid of dying.

That night when her husband , Cosmo, comes home, she looks him straight in the eyes and says: “Cosmo, I just want you to know, no matter what you do, you’re going to die just like everyone else.”

The point, of course, is that we are all going to die someday. And as the saying goes, the second certainty is taxes. The likelihood is you are going to pay death taxes. That’s the bad news. The good news is that through proper planning you can reduce or even eliminate your exposure to the death tax. Now, you would think that everyone would take advantage of one or more proven estate planning techniques for reducing or eliminating death taxes. The reality is quite different. For some reason, most of us tend to put off the thought of such planning. Even some of the most successful and wealthy people in our country’s history have failed to plan.

One of the most powerful and influential men of the 20th century was J.P. Morgan. His banking and financial empire was enormously successful. His financial dealings are legendary. He almost single-handedly helped the nation recover from the 1929 stock market crash by purchasing huge amounts of stock to keep the market from collapsing completely. His banks are still influential today.

When J.P. Morgan died he had a gross estate of $17 million. In the economy of the 1930's, that was a huge sum of money. However, this financial giant did no estate planning, and therefore, his estate wound up paying almost $10 million in death taxes. After all the probate costs were figured in, his estate shrank by a staggering 69%! And it wasn’t necessary. A case in point, legendary Texas oil man and investor, H.L. Hunt accumulated a huge fortune during his lifetime. When he died, he was worth an estimated $6 billion to $8 billion. However, at the time of his death, all he owned in his name was a ten year old Ford pick-up truck. Everything else was held by different trusts. Consequently, his estate paid no probate fees or death taxes!

Let me tell you about another true story: Quite a few years ago, my father-in-law was deeply involved in writing books and conducting seminars on the business of handicapping the Racing Form and betting on horse races. Unusual, but very interesting.

During that time, he heard about a young woman named Helen Tweedy who was faced with a serious crisis. Her father had, over the years, built up a large and very successful thoroughbred racing and breeding business with a large ranch in Kentucky. When he died in 1971, he left the entire estate to Helen. While the estate was being probated, she was hit with a tax bill of over $6 million. She had only one way to meet this bill. She was forced to sell the farm and most of the horses to pay the death tax.

Fortunately, she was able to spare a couple of young colts from the auction block. One of them, named Riva Ridge, won the highly valued Racing Triple Crown the following year. He immediately became an extremely valuable horse, worth millions in stud fees. The other colt she saved was named Secretariat and he became, arguably, the greatest race horse that has ever lived. He also won the Triple Crown in 1973, setting track records, winning by incredible margins and becoming a national idol. His picture was on the cover of Time, Newsweek, and many other national magazines. These colts were all that was left of her father’s racing empire, and only a great stroke of good fortune prevented them from also being sold to pay the death tax.

The biggest challenge in this marvelous country of ours is no longer that of creating a nice estate. Opportunities abound everywhere. The real challenge is keeping it after you’ve earned it, and being able to dispose of it as you wish!