Imagine if you will: Your children are signing a check, payable to the IRS for estate taxes totaling over a million dollars. Your children are being forced to liquidate your business, real estate and personal property, all at a fraction of their true value. Almost half of everything you own, your lifetime of effort, is being thrown away in estate taxes!

Hard to imagine? Yet time after time, case history tells us that most people who die with a net worth over a few million dollars end up paying hundreds of thousands of dollars, often millions, in unnecessary estate taxes.

Why? Not because they didn't care about their families. More likely, it's because they made one or more of the these common estate planning mistakes:

1. Thinking that because you have wills and trusts, that your estate plan is "all taken care of."
2. Believing that property held in "living trusts" and/or "joint tenancy" does not go through probate and is therefore not subject to estate taxes. Not true. Probate or non-probate, these assets are still part of your taxable estate.
3. Thinking that the unlimited marital deduction makes it possible to avoid estate taxes.
4. Underestimating your estate settlement costs. Depending upon when you die, and what congress decides to do regarding estate tax rates, large estates are likely to continue getting tagged with huge estate tax liabilities and remain clearly in the crosshairs of most politicians. For most wealthy families, this is the highest single tax you'll ever pay. Most estate owners are unaware of the confiscatory nature of this tax and the impact it will have on their family.
5. Failing to address the fact that any money in a pension, profit sharing, or IRA plan could end up being "double taxed," resulting in a loss of up to 70% of these dollars!
6. Believing that liquidity will protect your family from the devastation of estate taxes. Liquidity does nothing to solve the problem of shrinkage. 
7. Procrastinating. Most people spend about 40 years (80,000 hours) building their estate, yet they spend less time planning their estate than their family vacation!

If you care about your family, you can avoid these mistakes. And if you've been successful enough to build an estate over a few million dollars, you need to go beyond the traditional A/B trusts, living trusts, and pour-over wills. Ask your advisors about the applicability in your situation of CRT's, QPRT's, ILIT's, GRAT's, GRUT's, FLP's, etc. If they are not familiar with these tools and techniques of advanced estate planning, you should probably seek another advisor, regardless of how much time or money you've spent on your current plan.

If your estate was worth spending a lifetime to build, it must be worth preserving for your family!