Put Your Daughter on Your $600,000 Brokerage Account and Only Half of It Gets a Step-Up When You Die. The Other Half Carries Your 1998 Cost Basis Forever, and a Transfer-on-Death Form Would Have Stepped Up All of It
Adding your child to a brokerage account for convenience sounds harmless, but the IRS and your broker may quietly split that account in two the moment you die, leaving decades of gains exposed to taxes that a single form could have erased.
Adding your child to a brokerage account for convenience sounds harmless, but the IRS and your broker may quietly split that account in two the moment you die, leaving decades of gains exposed to taxes that a single form could have erased.
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