Your Legacy Isn’t in Your Will — It’s in What You Do While You’re Here, LFG Daily - November 25, 2025

Dream Bigger, Sleep Better

At Lloyd Financial Group, we’re constantly striving to give you more insight, more clarity, and more confidence when it comes to your money. Our Chief Investment Officer, Colin Symons, now delivers his own daily newsletter, offering deep analysis and a detailed outlook on the ever-changing investment world called Symons Says. Check it out and subscribe if you want a very detailed, daily analysis of the investment world. Colin has amazing content.

Meanwhile, the LFG Daily will continue to bring you quick, actionable summaries — blending market updates with financial planning and tax strategies to help you make smarter decisions every day. Together, they’re the perfect one-two punch: Colin brings the deep dive into Investments, we bring the daily edge.

Luke Lloyd, CEO Lloyd Financial Group

Why You Should Gift More While You’re Alive — Not Just Leave an Inheritance

Most people think about legacy as something that happens after they’re gone. But in today’s financial-planning environment—where tax rules have shifted, exemptions have been raised and made permanent, and wealth-transfer strategies are evolving—the most powerful legacy you can create is the one you actively shape during your lifetime.

Financially, emotionally, and strategically, lifetime gifting is becoming one of the smartest planning decisions high-net-worth families can make.

1. Living Gifts Deliver More Value Than Post-Death Inheritances

You get to see the impact.

A check written after you’re gone may help your children—but a gift given now can change the trajectory of their lives, careers, and families today. You get the benefit of watching it happen, guiding them, and celebrating milestones with them.

Your wisdom transfers with the money.

When you gift during your lifetime, you can pair financial support with mentorship, expectations, and values. A living legacy isn’t only dollars—it’s stewardship.

It strengthens family relationships.

Lifetime gifting creates opportunities for conversations: about money, responsibility, and your vision for future generations. Inheritances often arrive in silence; living gifts build connection.

2. Lifetime Gifting Is a Highly Powerful Tax Strategy

The new exemption landscape gives you breathing room—but planning still matters.

Under the new law, One Big Beautiful Bill Act (signed July 4, 2025) has permanently raised the federal gift, estate and generation-skipping transfer tax (GST) exemptions to $15 million per person (and $30 million for married couples) beginning January 1, 2026, indexed for inflation. This means the much-feared “sunset” of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) gift/estate tax regime no longer looms in the same way—it’s now made permanent at the higher level. That said:

• That doesn’t mean you should wait complacently. Even though the exemption is higher and permanent for now, future Congresses could change it. Many planners still favour locking in value today.

• State-level estate or inheritance taxes may still bite. So, even with the federal game settled (for the moment), local/state planning remains vitally important.

• Growth still matters. By making gifts during life of appreciating assets, you remove future appreciation from your estate—leveraging future growth outside your taxable base.

  
  

Annual Gifting Exclusion (simple and effective).

You can gift up to the annual exclusion amount each year (in 2025 the annual exclusion is $19,000 per recipient) without using any lifetime exemption. For a married couple, with multiple children and grandchildren, this can add up: $19,000 × number of recipients × 2 spouses = meaningful sums transferred tax‐free.

Strategic Gifting of Appreciating Assets.

Instead of giving cash, gift investments expected to grow. Future growth then occurs outside your estate—strongly leveraging the permanent exemption. Especially impactful if you expect a liquidity event or an asset to rapidly appreciate.

Pay tuition or medical expenses directly.

These payments (when made directly to an educational institution or medical provider) are still excluded from gift tax without using up your annual or lifetime gift exemption. It’s one of the cleanest, highest-impact ways to help children or grandchildren when they need it most.

3. Why Lifetime Gifting Creates a Stronger Legacy

You guide financial maturity.

Giving $100,000 to a 25-year-old with your guidance may be worth more than leaving $1 million in a will to a 55-year-old who never learned your values.

You help them avoid debt and stress.

A well-timed gift can:

• eliminate high-interest student loans

• fund a down payment

• help launch a business

• support child-care so both parents can work

• accelerate wealth compounding by decades

These are life-changing interventions that inheritance checks often arrive too late to accomplish.

You model generosity.

Your children and grandchildren will mimic the behaviours you demonstrate—not the ones described in your will. A living legacy teaches philanthropy, gratitude, and stewardship by example.

4. How We Help Clients Build Living Legacies at LFG

At your firm (Lloyd Financial Group), we often tell clients: Estate planning is not about death. It’s about control, impact, and intention.Our planning process focuses on:

• Strategic Gift Modeling How much can you gift today without affecting your long-term security? We model your lifetime cash-flow, investment returns, philanthropic goals, and estate tax exposure to propose optimal gift amounts and timing.

• Tax-Optimised Gifting Using annual exclusions, trusts, family limited partnerships (FLPs) or LLCs, gifting appreciated assets, and good timing relative to tax-law changes.

• Legacy Planning With Purpose Matching your financial support with your values—so wealth is a tool for family strength, not entitlement.

• Future Tax Law Scenarios Although the federal exemption is now “permanent,” we still plan for contingencies: for example, a change in administration, a future reduction in the exemption, or shifts in state-tax regimes.

  
  

The goal: reduce future taxes, elevate your family, and let you see your impact now—not just in an estate settlement later.

Final Thought: Legacy Is Best Lived, Not Just Left

Money passed at death is a transaction. Money gifted during life is a relationship.

Whether it’s helping your kids buy a home, funding education, seeding a business, or simply supporting your loved ones when it matters most, lifetime gifting turns wealth into impact—and impact into legacy.

Don’t leave your financial future up to chance. Let’s build a plan that gives you confidence today and peace of mind for tomorrow. Click here to schedule a meeting — I’m here to help you take the next step toward financial freedom.

Colin Symons, CIO Lloyd Financial Group

The Fed’s Daly and Waller said they would support a December rate cut.

The White House delayed their healthcare framework after Congressional pullback that reportedly involves a 2Y extension of Obamacare subsidies, new income caps for ACA enrollees, along with minimum premium payments.

Trump signed an executive order for the Genesis project for government support of AI projects.

NVDA is down -4% as META is in talks to spend billions on GOOG chips. Not liking the extra competition. Softbank was also down -10% on worries about AI competition between the two companies (ChatGPT and Gemini.) AVGO was up 11%, as they produce the GOOG chips.

PPI, Retail Sales, Consumer Confidence, and the Richmond Fed, today.

What does it all mean? Getting quieter as we approach max turkey consumption, though liquidity risk has been a bit slow to calm.

In the market, you should generally expect to feel great at tops and terrible at bottoms. Similarly, the CNN Fear & Greed index often seems like a contra indicator, where you should buy stocks when it bottoms and sell when it’s at highs. Right now, it seems to me people remain a bit nervous, so buying seems reasonable.

Again, my view is that the market started going down the second the Fed signaled a December rate cut was in question and turned around when the potential cut came back on the table. With rate cut odds now at 85%, I like the odds that the rate fear is likely done.

Of course, that’s not the only problem out there, just the main focus for the market. Things can still go wrong. For instance, SOFR funding stress sure makes it look like the Fed cut their balance sheet too much, creating fragility. Stopping Quantitative Tightening (QT) at the end of this month should help stop more stress, but is that enough? Things can, and will, go wrong eventually.

I don’t think I managed this mess particularly well, but like golf, stocks are not a game of perfect. You are constantly messing up and trying to correct those mistakes. In this case, I’d mentioned that Powell being hawkish was a risk to markets, then did nothing when that actually happened. To be totally transparent, my wife was hit by a car while crossing the street the day before Powell hit the markets, so I suppose I was a bit distracted (if you’re wondering, all things considered, she’s in decent shape.)

While I didn’t properly take action on Powell, I did start to get more aggressive once the shutdown came to an end, buying OWL and TTWO. Thus far, that’s been a fairly neutral choice but should put us in a better place if the market keeps rising. We also saw enough downside in the market last week that we had to make a portfolio risk-management decision to sell a stock, but we added a new risk position back, today.

All that was messy but ultimately, we took what we had and tried to make the best of it. We tried to be careful to sell a stock that had the potential to be hurt by continued downside, not a stock that was already down and oversold. When we replaced that stock, we tried to pick one that seemed unfairly oversold and could bounce back well, again, in the hopes we’d be better positioned for the future.

Ideally, in golf, you strike a long drive down the middle of the fairway, go for the green, and sink a putt for an eagle. Realistically, that rarely happens and you have to prepare for problems. I think I could have managed the last few weeks better, recognizing the risk and reacting, but life happens. In the end, I think the portfolios managed OK and are in good shape for the future.

That said, I don’t think we can relax. Yes, QT is ending, the Fed is cutting, and a more dovish Fed is coming. However, that can get inflation back up, funding risks are still there, and the economy is looking a bit shakier. I think we have some time for people to get more comfortable before more trouble finds us, but this is an environment where risk has the potential to assert itself very quickly.

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