Congress Just Gave You $15 Million. The IRS Will Take It Back If You Don't File One Form.
The One Big Beautiful Bill Act, signed July 4, 2025, permanently raised the federal estate tax exemption to $15 million per person. That is $30 million per married couple. No sunset. No expiration date. The biggest estate tax gift in American history.
Sounds like the problem is solved. Right?
I mean. Almost.
The Wall
Here is the rule in plain English. When you die, the IRS taxes everything above your exemption at 40%. The exemption is $15 million. Fewer than 0.2% of estates will ever owe a dime. For almost every married couple in the country, the estate tax no longer exists.
Sure.
The Bypass
But the exemption is personal. It belongs to you. Not to your spouse. Not to your kids. To you. And when you die, it dies with you.
Unless someone files one form.
Form 706. The federal estate tax return. It is the only way to pass your unused exemption to your surviving spouse. The IRS calls this the “portability election.” File the form and your spouse gets your leftover shelter. Skip the form and the shelter vanishes. Gone. Forever.
Now here is the trap. Estates below the $15 million line are not required to file. No tax owed, no form due. That is the law. And it sounds reasonable until you trace what happens next.
Bigger exemption. More estates below the line. More executors skip the form. More exemptions vanish. The generosity is the mechanism of forfeiture.
Think about that for a second. Congress raised the number to help families. But raising the number means fewer families file. And not filing is what kills the exemption. The gift is the trap.
Wall Street is finally repricing the next Exxon
In the 1970s, three oil giants found it. They buried it to protect oil.
Sixty years later, one company finally cracked it.
Google just signed a 15-year deal. The biggest names in tech are moving in fast.
A new Exxon is rising, and Wall Street is still pricing it like a sleepy little energy stock.
That window does not stay open once the crowd wakes up.
The Squeeze
The form costs $1,000 to $5,000 to prepare. Less than a set of tires. Skipping it can cost a family up to $6 million in estate tax. That is 40% of a $15 million exemption that just walked out the door because nobody asked for it.
Look. I will make it concrete.
Husband dies in 2026. His estate is worth $5 million. Everything goes to his wife. The marital deduction wipes out the tax. Zero owed. The executor closes the file. No Form 706. No portability election.
Ten years later, the wife dies. She has $20 million in combined assets. Her house appreciated. The life insurance paid out. The IRA grew. Only her own $15 million exemption applies. The remaining $5 million gets taxed at 40%.
That is a $2 million check to the IRS. It did not need to exist.
One more wrinkle. The exemption she could have inherited from her husband does not grow with inflation. It freezes at the dollar amount on the day he died. Every year she waits, that number shrinks in real terms. The clock started ticking the day he passed.
The Standoff
Executor: “No tax owed. Why file?”
CPA: “File anyway.”
Executor: “Why?”
CPA: “Because $6 million.”
Right.
Bank of America grew this stake 139%
Watch what the institutions are doing, not what they’re saying.
Bank of America increased its stake in one small gold company by 139%.
Jane Street, one of the most sophisticated trading firms alive, by 159%.
Millennium by 122%.
And one value fund, Kopernik Global, made it their single largest holding. They own roughly 8% of the entire company.
The company doesn’t even mine. It owns the rights to an 88 million ounce deposit, one of the largest on earth, with government-built roads and power already running to the property and permits that never expire.
Market cap: about $4 billion. Value of the metal in the ground at today’s prices: hundreds of billions.
The institutions did this math quietly, over months.
You get to do it this afternoon.
The Escape Hatch
If you missed the deadline, you might still have time. The IRS gave itself a fix. Revenue Procedure 2022-32 allows a late portability election up to five years from the date of death. No fee. You file the Form 706 late with a specific statement printed at the top of the return:
FILED PURSUANT TO REV. PROC. 2022-32 TO ELECT PORTABILITY UNDER § 2010(c)(5)(A)
That is the magic sentence. Type it. Print it. Mail it. (The form still cannot be e-filed. Paper only.)
After five years? You need a private letter ruling. That costs $3,450 to $14,500 in IRS fees alone, plus professional fees, for a total of $20,000 to $40,000. And the IRS does not have to say yes.
So the window matters. If your spouse died after September 23, 2021, the five-year clock is still running. Barely. If your spouse died in 2022, you have months. Not years. Months.
The Shrug
Congress gave you $15 million in shelter. The IRS will let you keep it. You just have to ask. On paper. Before the deadline.
The form costs less than a set of tires. The exemption it protects is worth more than most houses.
I dunno. Maybe file the form.
