Tax and Trust Planning, 1936

We will get around to a post on Earl MacNeill's two estate planning books – maybe next week. Meanwhile, look what turned up in a December, 1936 issue of the Cornell Alumni News:

BOOKS
By Cornellians

TO SAVE TAX COSTS
Adjustments to Minimize Taxes. By
Earl S. MacNeill '15. Trust Department,
The Continental Bank and Trust Company,
30 Broad Street, New York City.
This useful booklet illustrates various
plans for reducing the payment of taxes
by the establishment of trusts. With
hypothetical cases it indicates ways of
lessening the effect on an individual's income
of the new tax on corporate surpluses,
of using insurance as an automatic
offset to estate taxes, of setting up a life
insurance trust to avoid Federal and
State taxes which apply to life insurance
proceeds in excess of certain statutory
exemptions, of saving estate and gift
taxes by gifts anticipating increasing
values, of making savings by systematic
giving, and of ascertaining the ideal
ratio of gifts and testamentary estate
for maximum tax savings.
It includes also non-technical discussion
of such matters as gifts made in
contemplation of death, reservation of
control of trust property, reversion of
principal to the donor, establishment of
the right in another to terminate a trust,
the giving of trust income to dependents,
the valuation of large blocks of securities,
costs of trusts, and the necessity of employing
professional advice in setting up
trust plans. Appended are convenient
tables of gift taxes and Federal and state
estate and individual income taxes.
The author is assistant trust officer of
The Continental Bank and Trust Company
of New York. Stephen L. Vanderveer
'08, vice-president of the Bank,
writes that the booklet "is in great
demand."—A. M. P. Ί8

Continental was absorbed into Chemical Bank in 1947. Eventually Chemical merged with Chase and took the Chase name, which survives as the "brand" for the retail banking arm of JP Morgan Chase.