B.W., PENSACOLA, FLA.

Under federal estate-tax rules, you’re taxed on combined gifts and inheritances that exceed $600,000, with this exception: you can make annual $10,000 tax-free gifts to each of as many people as you want. John Gardner, a tax manager at the accounting firm Coopers & Lybrand, has three ideas for you.

(1) Give your daughter a $10,000 interest in the house each year. You’ll have to execute a deed each time. If she lives there, she’ll owe you a fair-market rent for whatever portion of the house still belongs to you. Your rental income will be taxable, but I’m sure you didn’t really expect to get away clean.

(2) Set up a qualified personal residence trust. You deed the house to your daughter while retaining the right to live in it for several years. That reduces its value as a gift. At the end of the period, she’ll get the house at a discounted value, lowering the gift tax you’ll owe. (If you die before the house passes to her, however, it remains in your estate.)

(3) Sell her the house, in installments. She signs a note agreeing to pay you $10,000 a year; you give her the $10,000 to do it with. You could halve the repayment time by giving her husband $10,000, too, and having them pay you $20,000 a year. You may owe a capital-gains tax on your profit from the sale. But the IRS has its patriotic duty, too.

Q: I’m having a problem with Fidelity Investments. On my year-end statement, they show my zero-coupon bank CDs at their maturity value rather than at their lower current value. I have to start making mandatory withdrawals from my IRA next year. If these zeros are overvalued, I’ll be forced to take out more money than necessary. I’ve been trying to explain this to Fidelity for two years now, with no success. Can you help them see the light?

JOSEPH HAHNEL, TROY, OHIO

A zero-coupon certificate of deposit is a bank CD that’s bought for less than its face value. It grows every year and reaches face value at maturity. Fidelity says that it reports a zero’s face value because that’s what most investors want. If you prefer the lower, current value, however, you’re supposed to be able to call Fidelity’s brokerage service, which is supposed to get the price from the bank. (Fidelity clients should keep this column, just in case.) Many other brokerage firms, Merrill Lynch among them, also provide current values only on request. Note that these are estimated values, not a guaranteed price if you want to sell.

Clients holding zero CDs do better at Schwab, which automatically provides current values on year-end statements. Prudential Securities does it monthly. They both buy the needed rate information from commercial sources like WSC Investment Services in New York. More firms may start giving this information, due to rising demand for better tax reporting from clients like you.

Q: Some lawyers brought a class action against our mortgage lender for accumulating too much money in our escrow accounts. We made no decision to sue; they decided for us. When the case was settled, we received no money, but the lawyers got a multimillion-dollar fee. That fee was labeled “miscellaneous disbursement” and deducted from everyone’s escrow accounts. I wonder how many people even know that their money was taken! I think we’re the victims of the lawyers, not the bank.

KAY HASLAM, YOUNGSVlLLE, LA.

The problem is the settlement statement that you and everyone else received. Instead of telling you up-front how much “apology money” that BancBoston would pay, it gave you a complex formula for figuring out your award yourself. That stealth accounting seems pretty easy to explain. The “winningest” class members got a mere $8.76; others got $1.78; a few got zero. The statement did say that the lawyers’ fees would be paid out of everyone’s escrow accounts, but no details were given. As it turned out, some 300,000 mortgage holders paid 5.32 percent each. You paid $52.30.

What was the lawyers’ total take? None of the three named attorneys–John Sharbrough and Mark Ezell in Alabama and Daniel Edelman in Chicago–returned repeated calls. Estimates range from $8 million to $14 million. Florida’s attorney general argued that BancBoston should have paid, but the judge disagreed.

You could have opted out of the deal and avoided attorneys’ fees. But you weren’t given the facts you needed to make that judgment, in words you could understand. That’s simply wrong. Every proposed class-action settlement should be required to disclose the benefits and costs, so the “clients” can judge the value received.