Sell your stock.
Pay ZERO taxes.

A standard asset protection trust shields assets from future creditors and stops there. An Upstream Asset Protection Trust adds one clause. The trust protector grants each of your parents a general power of appointment, a right that exists only on paper and only at their death. It gives them no ownership and no access during life. Because a person who holds a general power at death is treated by the tax code as owning that property, the trust assets are counted in your parent's estate. Their estate sits well under the roughly $15 million federal exemption, so no estate tax is actually due, but the cost basis resets to market value anyway. The reason it works is that unused exemption is worthless. It cannot be saved, gifted, or sold, and it simply expires when your parent dies. The power converts that wasted allowance into a basis reset on your position, and the assets never leave the trust to do it.

No. What the strategy needs is someone older than you, with room under their federal exemption, whom you are willing to name as a beneficiary of the trust. A parent is the usual answer because they meet all three conditions and are already family. A grandparent works identically. The tax rule itself does not test the relationship at all, so the powerholder does not technically have to be a blood relative. In practice that is rarely the right call, because naming someone outside the family gives them a beneficial interest in your trust and pulls their own estate and creditors into the analysis. Whoever it is has to be named when the trust is drafted. The class cannot be widened later.

No. During your parents' lifetimes the power gives them no ownership and no access, so there is nothing for anyone to reach through them. They cannot spend, sell, borrow against, or direct any trust asset. A parent's spouse, their friends, and their other heirs have no claim of any kind, because the assets never pass through a parent's estate. One narrow exception is worth stating plainly: if a parent's own estate cannot pay its own debts at death, creditors of that estate may be able to reach the slice of trust assets covered by the power. That risk is managed by sizing the power carefully and reviewing your parents' finances every year, and the protector can revoke the power outright if their circumstances deteriorate.

No. Your parent never gives up any of their own money or property, and nothing of theirs is put at risk. If the power ever did cause tax in their estate, which it is specifically drafted not to, the trust is required to pay it rather than the estate. Your siblings and any other heirs inherit exactly what they would have inherited had the trust never existed.

You ask the trustee, and the trustee decides. The trust document names your needs as the top priority and expressly permits distributing the entire trust to you, so a reasonable request from someone with nothing pending against them is normally approved within days. What you give up is the right to compel it. That limitation is exactly what makes the creditor protection real, and it is also why treating the trust as a current source of spending money weakens the shield over time. You can also change the trustee at any time.

A parent generally needs to live twelve months past the point the power is granted. A death inside that window can deny the basis reset on that contribution, though anything funded earlier is unaffected. It is the reason to start before a sale rather than during one.