The wealthy can avoid estate taxes via Single Premium Life insurance, but this assumes their investments are liquid enough to pull that off.

Life insurance of any sort is a great way to avoid liquidating a company and many wealthy folks use this to avoid both taxes and to cover estate tax needs. I

If you're in your twenties and you expect to be wealthy in the future now is a great time to be buying life insurance.

i disagree with that. life insurance is not a very liquid asset. it does not fight inflation and you can not leverage it very well. i looked into it quite a bit in my 20's and it just didn't make sense.

i think it creates risk, you have to guarantee for 20-50-80 years that you will be able to make the payments, and if you can not make the payments the policy terminates.

immagine if elon musk had been buying life insurance and then was in the fiscal mess he was in, he probably would have had to ditch the policy. the other risk is that you don't by enough life insurance to make it worth while.

there are plenty of good ways to transfer wealth while you are living. look into trusts. i also have a friend where his parents bought him a house over the course of like 10 or twenty years.

if you need to do any financial planing of this sort, i highly recommend talking to several talented fiscal planners with different risk levels. make them compete for your money, and don't let anyone of them plan all of your assets.

You can do Single Premium Life insurance that mitigates all your issues.

But I will agree that trusts are worth a look.

i think buffets point is to find people within your lifetime to hand the money over to. i think the inheritance taxes he is seeking would limit giving money to people in old age as a lottery.

  [quote]

"Well, I tell them a couple things. I tell them that they are better off making their decisions early on than later. Rich people live longer than most people and it’s the last will that counts. And if you are going to be 95 with a young blonde sitting on your lap, it is probably not the best time to be thinking about what you are going to be doing with your money. So think about it earlier on and decide really what your plans are.

"And I say, take care of everything you need yourself. The people I am talking about have a lot left over. Then try and figure out the way to improve the lot of the people in this world.

"If people have been touched by a given illness in their family, they are going to focus on that. If the school they went to made a real difference in their life they are going to want to focus on that.

"Bill and I make no recommendations to people as to what they do even when they do it, although I would be inclined to say there is some advantage in doing it earlier. In my case, by ten years after they settle on my death, all my money will be spent. It can’t go to institutions where they put it in endowments, it has to be spent. I would rather have the people I’ve selected during my lifetime handling it than some unknown person thirty or forty years hence."