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Employee
June 1, 2019
Question

My parents are trying to gift my wife, children and I money. To stay within the 14k gift exclusion do they need to write checks to each of us vs one large check?

  • June 1, 2019
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1 reply

June 1, 2019

Your parents can write a check of $14,000 for each of you and not have to bother with filing Form 709 for the gift tax. Actually, each parent could give a $14,000 gift to each of you and not need to file.

Even if they want to write one large check in excess of $14,000 they wouldn't need to actually pay any taxes unless they exceeded the $5.49 million federal estate exemption along the way.  Filing the 709 gift tax form is a way of keeping track of the reduction in the estate tax exemption.

Employee
June 1, 2019
They want to avoid filling out the 709 since it has to be done manually.  So if they wrote one large check to me and I divided up between everyone, they'd still need to fill out the 709?