Joe Robbie built the Miami Dolphins into an NFL franchise, but when he died in 1990 without a completed estate plan, his family learned how expensive that gap can be.
“Most of his assets were in real estate and the team, which are not liquid. It’s not like you could sell some stocks and bonds and mutual funds and free up the cash,” says Michael Gold, founder and CEO of Gold Family Wealth in Westport, Connecticut. After four years of disputes, the family sold the team for roughly $108 million, and $47 million went straight to the IRS.
That story sits at the center of how Michael Gold, a Westport advisor who works almost exclusively with ultra-high-net-worth families, thinks about trusts. Rather than a document to sign once an estate plan is otherwise finished, Gold’s practice treats trust selection as the starting point, the architecture that determines whether wealth actually reaches the next generation intact.
The Dynasty Trust anchors the architecture
The Dynasty Trust is the tool Gold points to first for families thinking in decades rather than years. Structured as an irrevocable trust and funded using a person’s lifetime gift and generation-skipping transfer exemptions, it can hold assets outside a family’s taxable estate permanently, so long as the jurisdiction allows the trust to continue.
For 2026, that exemption stands at $15 million per individual, or $30 million for a married couple using portability, after Congress made the higher exemption permanent and inflation-indexed. The contrast Gold draws is stark: $13 million handed to an heir outright is exposed to creditors, divorce claims and that heir’s own eventual estate tax. The same $13 million placed inside a Dynasty Trust is shielded from all three. It compounds for the family across generations instead of being taxed down at every transfer.
GRATs and SLATs turn time into protection
Two other structures do more targeted work. A Grantor Retained Annuity Trust, or GRAT, lets a business owner move a discountable or illiquid asset, often private company stock, into a trust that pays back an annuity over a set term. Anything the asset earns above the IRS’s hurdle rate passes to heirs free of additional tax, which makes the GRAT useful for owners nearing a sale.
A Spousal Lifetime Access Trust, or SLAT, solves a different problem: removing assets from a taxable estate without losing a spouse’s access to them. Gold Family Wealth has guided clients through this move. Before selling his company, one client, Daniel F., transferred $13.99 million, his full individual exemption at the time, into a SLAT for his wife, Lori, funding it with closely held company stock and a diversified portfolio. The assets grew outside the couple’s taxable estate while Lori retained lifetime access. Decades later, the trust had grown to roughly $38 million. All of it passed to their daughters free of estate tax. Gold calls the structure “a modern expression of love, foresight, and stewardship.”
Liquidity, fortification and the human element
Illiquidity is precisely what caught the Robbie family without options. An Irrevocable Life Insurance Trust, or ILIT, addresses that risk directly: it owns a life insurance policy outside the taxable estate, so the death benefit delivers cash exactly when an estate needs it, without inflating the tax bill the way a personally owned policy would.
“Trusts are the keep; the Family Limited Partnership is the fortified wall surrounding it,” is how Gold’s practice describes the two structures together. The FLP consolidates business interests or real estate under one entity. A founder keeps control as general partner and transfers limited partnership interests to the next generation, often at a meaningful valuation discount.
None of it works without the family behind it. Gold Family Wealth points to the Getty family, whose fortune once made J. Paul Getty the world’s richest man, as the cautionary counterexample. Getty’s trust survived decades of lawyers picking at it without cracking. It could not stop the drug addiction and string of early deaths that followed his death, a pattern of misfortune journalists have long called the Getty curse rather than a dynasty.
“Your wealth plan is human before it is technical. Documents matter. Trusts matter. Tax planning matters. But people live with the consequences,” Gold Family Wealth’s Radical Ownership white paper states. It leaves every client with the same question to answer: are you preparing your family for the wealth as intentionally as you are preparing the wealth for your family?
For Michael Gold, that question is why trust architecture, not any single document, sits at the center of the plan. “The right professionals are solving the same problem together,” the same white paper states, rather than each specialist working in isolation. It is a lesson Joe Robbie’s family learned too late, and one Gold’s Westport clients are increasingly learning in advance.
Investment advisory services offered through CWM, LLC, an SEC Registered Investment Advisor.
This content is provided for informational purposes only and is not a substitute for professional advice. AFP editorial staff were not involved in the creation of this content.
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