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NFA estate Qs.....

jcountry

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The Hen that laid the Golden Legos
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I am thinking of finally getting a couple of cans and such.

My main question concerns what happens when my estate needs to be settled.

I am thinking a trust with both me and my wife would be the way to go. She isn't really a gun person. (Not an anti, but just not into it..... In much the same way as I'm not into purses.)

Anyhow, wouldn't a trust make this simpler and easier. Seems to me that the non-trust route is rife with trouble.

She would have to sell through a SOT dealer, wouldn't she?
 
Trust would make it easier, best to add children as a beneficiary as well.

No she wouldn’t have to sell through a SOT. She could sell them hers of but would have to file the paperwork herself and wait for the stamp to be approve so it would be a headache for her
 
A trust would make it easier when you die, but then there's the initial trouble and cost of setting up a trust in the first place. Without a trust, you can leave NFA registered items to somebody in your will and ATF says that that is not subject to a transfer tax. Your relatives will not have to pay $200 to inherit your NFA firearms; they will end up registering them for free .

ATF has a long-standing policy that if you die as an individual NFA weapons owner, the executor of your estate may lock up the weapons in secure storage while your estate is being administered and while those weapons are transferred o the new owners that you left them to in your will.
 
Let's say I had a friend or relative whom I named in my will as the inheritor.....

Would that person have to pay the $200 transfer fee, or could she just add them to the trust, and then delete herself? I'm guessing not.
 
Let's say I had a friend or relative whom I named in my will as the inheritor.....

Would that person have to pay the $200 transfer fee, or could she just add them to the trust, and then delete herself? I'm guessing not.


I'm not sure what you're asking. Once you die only a trustee can potentially add another trustee to the trust if you have given the power to a trustee other than yourself.

But a "bigger picture" question is: do you own the weapons individually or do you own them through a trust?
If it's a trust, then think of it as the trust owning them. Not you. The trust would be like a corporation --it survives its founders; the trust doesn't die when you die (unless that is how you have it set up).
You cannot leave any Trust property to some beneficiary in your will.
It's not your personal property anymore once you pledge and assign it to the trust.
 
Two follow up questions:
1) if trust has only one survivor, do they have to transfer to themselves? Doesn’t a trust require 2 or more trustees?
2) what would be the disposition of items if no survivors?
And for extra credit, is the ATF processing time any different?
 
I’ve read about the 41F amendment and all.

Something I don’t understand...... If you kick off and someone listed on the trust inherits the NFA items, don’t they eventually have to do the fingerprint/background stuff anyhow? I understand that the trust owns the items, but if the person listed on the trust inherits it-wouldn’t they have to go through the fingerprint background garbage in order to control the trust (and sell the items?)
 
If you have an existing trust, you wouldn't have to do the fingerprint/picture stuff unless you added items.

I also understood that there was an easy way to do a quick, free transfer to a surviving spouse. Otherwise the survivor would be in possession illegally. Pretty good article about it here...

https://www.dakotasilencer.com/what-happens-to-your-silencer-when-you-die/
 
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