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> If you have a billion in stock, you could leverage that to pay personal expenses.

And how do you pay back that loan?

> You could use an unrealized loss over there to balance out the cash you're taking in from a gain over there.

So can everyone.

> If you play that game long enough, your descendants will get a cost basis step up.

That's a strong argument for reforming estate taxation.




> And how do you pay back that loan?

Get another loan. If you're rich your assets are growing and so refinancing an existing loan with a larger one gives you more cash to spend and to perform perfunctory maintenance on the loan until it's time for an even bigger loan.

Dying in debt to your trust fund just means the trust fund can write off a large loss before estate taxes.


This is not how it works. You don’t write off secured debt loses when you die all the while passing on billions of assets.

I swear people just make things up to try and prove their point.


I wouldn't mock the parent so quickly. See page 24 here for the game that's being played: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3242314

Particularly the section "Stepped-up Basis on Death (Die)"




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