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Posted By: Frank Wakefield

Some states have inheritance taxes. The feds tax the estate, states tax the inheritance.

Basis is not automatically the value at the time of death, as stated above. IF the cards were included in the estate at that value, then you'd have that basis. IF the cards weren't scheduled in the estate at that value, then you wouldn't.

And with that I'm done with any attempt to explain it. Folks keep wanting to say what makes sense or what they think is fair... and common sense really didn't permeate the Internal Revenue Code, so an expectation of fairness and common sense leads to disappointment.