Who Needs An Estate Plan? If you are reading this, you need an estate plan. Why? The short answer is that everyone age 18 and older needs an estate plan. It does not matter whether you are old or young, have built up considerable wealth or are just entering adulthood—you need a written plan to [...]
Beware of Trust Scams & How to Spot Them Trusts are widely used in estate planning to protect and transfer a person’s assets (money, accounts, property, etc.), sometimes in a tax-advantaged manner. Some trusts are highly complex, with multiple parties, intricate structures, specialized legal terms, and references to arcane tax law that can be difficult [...]
How To Give Real Property To a Loved One At Your Death Without Probate Court Involvement A home is often one of the most important assets that people own. Therefore, most people want to stay in their home until they die and then have a loved one receive it. One common way to pass a [...]
Be Careful Relying on Life Insurance to Provide for Loved Ones In an estate plan, life insurance can be used as a source of immediate liquidity for beneficiaries by offering a tax-free, lump-sum payment upon the insured’s death. About half of Americans have a life insurance policy. The primary reason people purchase life insurance is [...]
Wills, Trusts, & Dying Intestate: How They Differ Most people understand that having an estate plan benefits them and their loved ones. However, many individuals do not initiate the estate planning process because they do not fully understand the nuances of foundational estate planning tools such as a will and a trust and the full [...]
Caution: Using a DIY Deed To Avoid Probate Can Lead To Unintended Consequences One common way to avoid the probate requirement for real estate after the owner dies is to add children or other individuals to the property title as joint owners with rights of survivorship. When joint owners have survivorship rights and one joint [...]
Have You Checked Your Beneficiary Designations Lately? You regularly check the balances of your retirement, bank, and investment accounts. But when was the last time you checked the beneficiary designations on these accounts (and really, all the other accounts that allow you to name a beneficiary)? It may have been years since you first opened [...]
How To Pick a Trustee, Executor & Agent Under a Power Of Attorney While the term fiduciary is a legal term with a rich history, it generally means someone who is legally obligated to act in another person’s best interest. Trustees, executors, and agents are examples of fiduciaries. When you select people to fill these [...]
How Are My Business Documents Relevant to My Estate Plan? Studies consistently find that only about 25–35 percent of Americans have an estate plan, a shockingly low rate when you consider that, in the absence of a plan, the state—not you or your family—decides what happens to your assets, including your business interests. The overall [...]
3 Ways To Manage The Cost Of Your Estate Plan You may think creating a simple estate plan should be easy and something you can do independently. Unfortunately, this is not the case. Estate planning laws vary greatly from state to state, can sometimes be complicated, and constantly change. An experienced estate planning attorney stays [...]
