Estate Tax Planning Trusts: A Comprehensive Guide

The purpose of estate tax planning is to maximize the assets you pass on to future generations by minimizing gift and estate taxes. Estate-tax strategies revolve around the use of...
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Tax Deferral Strategy: Comparing the Big Three

You can defer capital gain taxes with a Charitable Remainder Trust, Opportunity Zone, or Exchange Fund. CRTs get the best returns. Which is right for you?
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Solar Tax Incentives vs. Oil and Gas Well Investments: A Comprehensive Comparison

Taking advantage of solar tax incentives and investing in oil and gas wells are two popular strategies for offsetting ordinary income tax. How do you know which one is right...
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QSBS Stacking Options

The Qualified Small Business Stock exemption, or QSBS, is the best tax break around. As a result of Congress’s push early in the new millennium to encourage Americans to start...
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How Valur Works With Advisors: A Client’s Journey

Valur can help advisors and their clients identify, understand and implement tax and estate-planning trusts to create more wealth.
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Unitrust Definition

A unitrust is a type of trust that allows the beneficiary to receive a fixed percentage of the trust’s corpus or value each year. The unitrust amount is the fixed percentage the beneficiary will receive each year, regardless of how the investments perform. Understanding this term is essential for planning and budgeting purposes.

For example, if a trust has an annual unitrust amount of 5%, the beneficiary will receive 5% of the trust’s value each year. This type of trust may help plan for future expenses, allowing for a predictable income stream.

The unitrust amount determines how much money from the assets in the trust the beneficiary will receive each year. This amount can be significant for estates or trusts that are larger and have a lot of money invested in them.

To know the unitrust amount, divide the annual distribution by the initial principal. This number will give you the percentage of the principal that the trust will pay out each year.

Next Steps

Knowing the unitrust amount when setting up a trust is essential, as this will help you plan for the future. Find out more about your unitrust with our Charitable Remainder Trust calculator.

Read more of the definitions our team at Valur prepared for you.

About Valur

We built a platform to give everyone access to the tax and wealth-building tools of the ultra-rich like Mark Zuckerberg and Phil Knight. We make it simple and seamless for our customers to take advantage of these hard-to-access tax-advantaged structures so you can build your wealth more efficiently at less than half the cost of competitors. From picking the best strategy to taking care of all the setup and ongoing overhead, we make it easy and have helped create more than $500m in wealth for our customers.

Mani Mahadevan

Mani Mahadevan

Founder & CEO

Mani is the founder and CEO of Valur. He brings deep financial and strategic expertise from his prior roles at McKinsey & Company and Goldman Sachs. Mani earned his degree from the University of Michigan and launched Valur in 2020 to transform how individuals and advisors approach tax planning.

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