Automate Estate Tax Modeling with Valuation Discounts in Luminary

Manual tax calculations don’t scale, and they’re prone to error.

When planning for high-net-worth estates, even small details can have major implications. Valuation discounts are critical to tax-efficient wealth transfer, and it’s essential to get the math — and the strategy — right.

But until now, that’s been easier said than done.

Applying valuation discounts on specific entities to multiple planning scenarios across a client’s estate has historically been cumbersome. Advisors often rely on Excel to recalculate tax implications manually, opening the door for inconsistencies and oversight. In many instances, scenario models can show inflated numbers, failing to reflect the real value of wealth preserved. And if a discount or valuation is updated, changes aren’t automatically applied to calculations and waterfall diagrams, requiring hours of work from advisors to recalculate financial implications and outcomes.

Estate plans are complicated enough, and manually updating spreadsheets only adds complexity. With this release, Luminary removes unnecessary friction from the planning process.

‍

Discount modeling, built right into your workflow.

Now, when updating an estate plan in Luminary, you can apply a discount percentage directly to the relevant entities. Whether it’s a family business held in trust or a minority stake in a partnership, discounted values are automatically reflected in all downstream calculations. This includes estate tax modeling, estate waterfall diagrams, and hypothetical gifts and strategies like GRATs, installment sales, and intra-family loans.

Let’s say a client owns a business entity valued at $10M, but due to minority interest and lack of marketability, it qualifies for a 25% discount. By applying the discount in Luminary, the estate tax is correctly calculated on a $7.5M valuation.

Working with nested entities? We handle those too. If a revocable trust owns a discounted LLC, Luminary blends the total value and applies the appropriate discount to the revocable trust. In hypothetical transfers, you can select which specific asset to transfer — and Luminary will apply the correct discount based on that selection.

See immediate and direct benefits for advisors…

• Greater accuracy across all tax scenarios, even as you model changes in growth, exemptions, and death years.
• Significant time savings, eliminating the need to recalculate estate and gift taxes manually when modeling projections or hypothetical scenarios.
• Streamlined knowledge capture, turning planning inputs into reusable data assets that support future conversations and insights.

…and your clients:

• A more comprehensive and transparent understanding of the impact of their legacy.
• Confidence that their plan reflects the full impact of tax-efficient strategies.
• Increased visibility into total wealth preserved for future generations.

Three clicks. No spreadsheets.

As always, we’ve built this feature to integrate seamlessly with your existing workflows. Just navigate to any entity in the estate plan, click "Update Holdings," enter the discount percentage, and save. Luminary does the rest — updating tax calculations, strategy outcomes, and visualizations automatically.

Purpose-built for expert advisors

This feature is part of Luminary’s commitment to enabling intuitive, comprehensive planning that reflects real-world complexity. We’re helping advisors eliminate unnecessary friction — freeing them to spend more time on strategy and client engagement, and less time in Excel.

Book a demo to see how Luminary can elevate your trust & estate services.