Here's a number worth sitting with. A surgeon can have a $9 million estate, comfortably under the federal exemption, owe nothing in federal estate tax, and still have less than $300,000 of it sitting in cash. That's not a stress test. That's the ordinary math of a practice-heavy balance sheet.

In this episode, Jared picks up where the show's estate-exemption episode left off, on the tool that closes that gap: the Irrevocable Life Insurance Trust, or ILIT. He walks through the actual mechanism (the trust owns the policy, not you, which is what keeps the death benefit out of your taxable estate), how to fund it correctly using Crummey withdrawal rights without touching your lifetime exemption, and the three-year lookback rule that matters if you're moving an existing policy into a new trust.

Jared also covers what nobody sells you on: the real cost isn't the legal fees, it's control. Once the policy belongs to the trust, it belongs to the trust. He closes with a second worked example, a blended family where an ILIT solves an inheritance-fairness problem without forcing a sale of the practice itself.