I was sitting in my favorite watering hole recently and I ran across an old acquaintance. He ran a company, that was started by his father, that distributed cheese to local supermarkets. His mother had just passed away and had not properly planned her estate. To make a long story short an estate worth over six million dollars is going to be taxed close to 3 million dollars. The sad part about it is most of it could have been passed on to the next generation with a lot less estate taxes paid.