(FORTUNE Small Business) – You can be forgiven if you haven't been focusing on that burgeoning, many-zeroed figure that will someday be your personal net worth. Fine-tuning the way you and your heirs will deal with your wealth seems like pure folly in a year that's jammed with stingy earnings forecasts. Net income, not net worth, may be all you really crave. And now that George Bush may fulfill his election promise to repeal the estate tax, why worry about a problem that could disappear?

Reason No. 1: Neither businesses nor presidents are any good at following a script. Reason No. 2: Even though your firm's fortunes can turn on a dime, protecting those fortunes takes longer. That's why you should consider adopting one of the greatest personal finance tools for business owners--the limited liability company (LLC).

LLCs are a relatively new form of business entity with a batch of operating benefits. But their value in estate planning isn't widely understood, particularly by younger business owners. In time LLCs stand a good chance of becoming more popular than family limited partnerships (FLPs), previously the favored estate-chiseling tool (and still the best choice in some cases).

Here's how a plain-vanilla LLC would work. After creating an LLC, a 40-year-old makes an annual gift of LLC units worth $10,000 to each of his kids. After 25 years, the kids will own a big chunk of the business. More important, much of the company's growth in value is protected. Explains Tom Peckham, a partner at Bingham Dana, a Boston-based law firm: As the value of shares increases over time, all the appreciation is sheltered from estate taxes.

The plain-vanilla version works, but it's no more effective than an FLP. The real power of an LLC emerges when you want to treat your stakeholders differently. Suppose you're a 65-year-old who's well-prepared for retirement and wants to avoid growth in your estate. An LLC will let you direct all appreciation in your company's value to your kids' LLC units, while your own units simply generate a fixed income. This ability to allocate income, distributions, deductions, and voting rights among different classes of stakeholders gives owners terrific precision in both estate and succession planning. You could dictate one set of characteristics for your workers, another for your kids, and a third for the interests that will go to charity. An FLP is sometimes as versatile, but doesn't match an LLC's operating benefits. Besides being cheaper to maintain, LLCs offer better liability protection for shareholders, whose assets cannot be pursued by creditors.

Once you do transfer, LLCs help you make the most of your annual or one-time gifts. You'll be able to discount the company's value--with the help of a professional--because LLC units aren't marketable the way public securities are. Further discounts may apply if units are minority interests or nonvoting units.

Are there drawbacks? Yes. If you're carving your estate, an LLC won't let you cut as deeply as an FLP. You must have majority ownership to control the company in an LLC, while you need only 1% ownership in an FLP.

If you decide to turn your company into an LLC, look for an attorney who is abreast of all current LLC wrinkles in your state and in Delaware, where many LLCs are incorporated. Expect fees to run $1,000 to $5,000. And enjoy the revelation that comes with a proper dose of estate planning--fantasizing about your future wealth can be one of the smartest things you've ever done.