Applying a tax when the financial purpose of the loan is solely to avoid paying any taxes on realizing the gains is what I’m talking about. This is demonstrably a vehicle of tax avoidance used by wealthy individuals to avoid taxes on what they would otherwise have to because they would have to sell the asset otherwise
These are variable rate short-term loans. Even the best, in the US, is WSJ prime rate - 0.75 points - that would be 7.25% right now.
Maybe when interest rates were near 0, you could have stretched it for a while, but it still sounds like little more than living off credit cards.
In the most simplified version of any of this though it either allows you to do the following
- delay paying taxes until you can’t snowball loans any longer. Then you transfer (not sell!) the assets to the bank and they sell it to cover the loan
- pay off the loan through the estate after death, which has its own tax implications can be structured in such a way to further avoid or mitigate taxes on these assets
- In the most common cases it allows the delay of sale long enough that you can cover the loan with a sale of other assets, e.g. real estate which have a different tax structure as well on income derived, and cover the loan that way.
Usually these types of loans are used to buy another investment vehicle, like real estate. Then those assets appreciate and are used to payoff the loan or roll into a bigger loan etc.
You really have to be of a certain asset class to do all this
[0]: https://smartasset.com/investing/buy-borrow-die-how-the-rich...
[1]: https://www.wsj.com/articles/buy-borrow-die-how-rich-america...
[2]: https://www.finra.org/investors/insights/securities-backed-l...
[3]: https://www.businessinsider.com/securities-asset-backed-loan...