Pass an Inheritance    to Next in Line

However, you don't have to accept the bequest and may be able to still keep the money in the family. How? By using a "qualified written disclaimer" to bypass your estate. This amounts to a legal refusal of the inheritance.

For estate and gift tax purposes, the property is treated as if you never received it and automatically passes to the next beneficiary in line in the deceased person's will. Thus, you can effectively put the property in the hands of your children - where it would probably have ended up anyway - generally without any negative estate or gift tax consequences.

To qualify for tax purposes, you must meet certain requirements:

• Your disclaimer must be in writing and be irrevocable.
• You must disclaim the gift within a certain amount of time - generally nine months after the date of death or taxable transfer.
• You must take action before you receive any benefits from the gift.

Under the law, you cannot direct or control who gets the gift you're refusing. But unless an alternate beneficiary is named in the will, the assets are passed along as if you were out of the picture. In other words, they pass to the next-in-line beneficiary in the deceased person's will. So you generally can't refuse an inheritance and still have any control over where the money actually goes. That depends strictly on what the will states.

A disclaimer can be an effective postmortem estate-planning tool for many families. But it must be done properly taking into account the federal tax law and state inheritance laws to be valid. For more information, talk with your estate-planning adviser.