Create trusts, businesses, and holding groups

Last updated: October 22, 2025

Introduction

Luminary allows users to create many different types of entities that make up your client’s estate so you can get very detailed as you build out your client’s family enterprise. Below, we’ll provide some helpful tips and tricks for building out a family in Luminary.

Learn more about how Luminary AI supports entity creation:

📄 AI suggestions for entity details

Direct holdings

For every new client, Luminary automatically creates direct holding groups to structure collections of accounts/assets, liabilities, and insurance policies that are held directly by clients. When holdings are added to a holding group, it will show up as a tile on the waterfall.

If additional tiles for direct holdings are desired, create a new holding group and select the type of holding group if required.

Holding groups are organized by owner. The following options will appear showing distinct types of direct holding structures that are possible. These grouping are destined to consolidate holdings that follow the same dispositions.

Holding group type

Common use cases

Joint assets & liabilities

Joint brokerage accounts, jointly titled real estate, joint tenants/community property/TIC accounts

Please note that the account types are for display purposes and don’t result in automatic updates of the estate waterfall

Personal assets & liabilities

Individual brokerage accounts, untitled property, real estate titled in an individuals name

Retirement accounts

IRA, Roth accounts, employer sponsored plans like 401(k), deferred compensation plans

UGMA/UTMA accounts

UTMA or UGMA, accounts for minors

529 plans

Education savings accounts

Life insurance policies

Life insurance held either individually or jointly, but not held in ILITs

Direct holding groups can not be owned by other Luminary entities. For assets/accounts owned by other entities (e.g. trust or business), structure those as assets held within those specific entities

📄 Add assets, liabilities, and insurance

Personal & family trusts

Enter assets that are held in trust, for the benefit of non-charitable beneficiaries.

Here are a few tips for entering personal & family trusts:

  • If you have individual trusts for beneficiaries that are all exactly the same, you can consider grouping the subtrusts

    • Consider entering “Grandchildrens’ Trusts” instead of “Grandchild 1 Trust”, “Grandchild 2 Trust”

  • Don’t enter subtrusts or testamentary entities that are created at the death of the grantor as new entities

    • These types of trusts can be added in the “Dispositions” section of the parent trust

Account type

Common use cases

Irrevocable trust

Grantor trusts, non-grantor trusts, INGs, other trusts that are not SLATs, GRATs, ILITs or QPRTs. Learn more here:

📄 Grantor trusts

Revocable trust

Revocable living trusts, inter vivos trusts

Spousal lifetime access trust (SLAT)

Trusts funded by one spouse, for the benefit of the other spouse

Grantor retained annuity trust (GRAT)

A specific estate planning strategy used to transfer wealth out of a grantor’s estate | Learn more here:

📄 GRATs (Grantor retained annuity trusts)

Irrevocable life insurance trust (ILIT)

Trusts that are used to hold life insurance

Qualified personal residence trust (QPRT)

Trusts that are used to gift primary real estate to non-charitable beneficiaries

Charitable entities

Use any of these four entity types to enter charitable entities in Luminary:

  • Charitable remainder trusts

  • Charitable lead trusts

  • Donor advised funds

  • Private foundations

Business entities

Use these entity types to enter in business entities, including LLCs, GPs, LPs, S-corps, C-corps, and sole proprietorships.

Here are a few tips for entering personal & family trusts:

  • Enter business entities that were created by the grantor such as family operating businesses, family limited partnerships, or other business entities formed by the family for estate planning purposes

    • Most of our customers do not enter the details of business entities, such as LP ownerships in large hedge funds, as distinct business entities, instead they include the value of these investments in the owning trusts and accounts

  • Luminary offers robust ownership structure data entry, as well as tracking key people

    • Ownership can be individuals or other entities, and we offer diagram ownership views under the “Entities” tab of the platform

  • You can store all information and documents needed to file with finCEN for CTA compliance using Luminary

In certain cases, there will be some potential overlap between creating business entities and adding businesses as structured assets within another entity. If business ownership is directly held, it is simpler to structure those as assets held within other entities like a trust or personal account. Learn more: 📄 Add assets