Right now, if your estate is worth less than roughly $13 million (about $26 million for a married couple), you don’t have to worry about your heirs paying a federal estate tax. But that’s likely to change. The sunset of the current estate and income tax regime is far from certain. Still, given the breadth of the potential changes, it may make sense to plan for the possibilities.

As a business owner — whether a 100 percent owner or part owner — it’s important to recognize that your business needs to be accounted for as part of a good estate plan.

Of course, everyone should have an estate plan in place to cover the distribution of assets and take care of family or loved ones. But, for a business owner, additional thought needs to be given to the operation and future success of the enterprise.

Here are four areas in which a business owner’s planning is unique:

You might associate trusts with the ultrawealthy, or with young adults who don’t have to work. But trusts have benefits for a far wider swath of the socioeconomic spectrum — a swath that likely includes you.

“Not knowing how trusts work or what they’re used for, other than passing down assets to children, can keep people from setting one up,” said Michele Collins, director of advanced sales at MassMutual’s Boston office. “So can being afraid of the cost as well as being uncomfortable planning for death, which is when trust discussions often come up.”

Here’s a rundown of the most common types of trusts and their purpose.

We’ve all heard stories of contested wills and disinherited ne’er-do-wells among the rich and famous. Hollywood has used this storyline countless times, creating a motive for the bad guy or a righteous quest for good. It makes for great theater and even better supermarket tabloid headlines, but for the rest of us, it’s something we actively seek to avoid.

In theory, providing equal shares of your estate to your children is a case of simple math. Add up the assets and divide by the number of kids. But the problem for business owners is that the business, often the estate’s largest asset, is illiquid. There’s no cash to divvy up. And if the business is to be passed down to the next generation — specifically to those actively involved in the business — how do you make the others "whole" while keeping the business in one piece?

The Supreme Court recently ruled that life insurance proceeds received by a corporation to cover the repurchase of the deceased shareholder’s stock interest must be included in the value of the corporation for federal estate tax purposes. Those proceeds are not offset by the corporation’s obligation to repurchase the deceased shareholder’s stock.

It may be hard to imagine right now, but when you think about it, odds are that the business you’ve worked so hard to create will be owned by someone else in the future.

Eventually, you will either give up the helm voluntarily before or when you retire, or involuntarily as the result of an unexpected event.