The federal government and most states regard Rogoff and Lichter as strangers; they do not benefit from the estate planning advantages the government offers married heterosexual couples. Like many gay couples, they must find alternative ways to achieve their financial and estate planning goals.

"We’ve had to treat the whole estate very gingerly," says Rogoff, who lives in New York City and is a professor at the Yale School of Drama. "It’s crazy. I mean, we’ve finally amassed something that represents security. But it doesn’t feel secure."

Bereft of Benefits
Gay couples need to take extra steps to protect their wealth from state and federal tax collectors, as well as from family members who may contest their wills. They must also navigate a minefield of emotionally charged issues, ranging from family opposition to their relationships to decisions over the need for a domestic partnership agreement, which is similar to a prenuptial agreement.

TOP VIEW: Federal law grants some 1,200 rights to married couples, but same-sex partners enjoy none of these benefits. This circumstance results in a number of significant obstacles that gay individuals who wish to bequeath their assets to their partners must address. In the absence of a marital exemption, the surviving partner becomes subject to estate tax; there are also legal ambiguities that family members of the deceased can exploit to challenge the distribution of assets to the other partner. Careful planning, using iron-clad wills and, where appropriate, trusts, can ensure same-sex couples achieve their estate planning goals.

Wealth managers who work with same-sex couples often resort to unusual strategies to lessen their clients’ tax burden to the greatest extent possible. But while savvy advisors can approximate some of the benefits of marriage through a complicated hodgepodge of legal documents and investment vehicles, it remains impossible to completely replicate the full panoply of marital safeguards enjoyed by straight couples.

Under the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act, the federal government does not extend any statutory legal benefits and protections available to married couples to gay couples, regardless of whether or not the state in which they reside recognizes same-sex unions. "There are something like 1,200 marriage rights granted under federal law," notes Richard C. Milstein, a Miami-based trusts and estate attorney who works with many gay couples. Consider, for example, the "unlimited marital deduction," which allows one spouse to pass an unlimited amount of money to the other without paying federal estate tax. In the case of a gay couple, the surviving partner would face federal taxes of up to 48 percent on estates that exceed $1.5 million.

Although Massachusetts allows same-sex marriages, and several other states have implemented or are considering rule changes that would confer some rights to homosexual couples, the legal weight of same-sex civil unions and marriages is limited. To date, 38 states have followed the federal government’s lead and passed their own laws establishing that they do not recognize same-sex unions from other states. If a gay person living in one of these states dies without a trust or will, a distant relative would be considered the beneficiary of the estate before that person’s partner, regardless of how long the two lived together.