Recent Blog Posts
If You Are Going To Disinherit Your Children, Do It The Right Way
If you disinherit your children, you are not the first person who has ever done so. There are right ways and wrong ways to disinherit your children. First, make a firm decision about whether you want your children to inherit from your estate. If the answer is “no,” then make your will unambiguous about… Read More »
Can a Letter Of Wishes Turn Wishful Thinking Into Reality?
In the course of making your estate plan, you will probably have conversations with your estate planning lawyer about the messages you wish to communicate to your family at the end of your life or after you are gone. The provisions of your will are an appropriate place to do this only insofar as… Read More »
Estate Planning Is Love, Especially For Unmarried Couples
For decades, journalists and podcasters have been talking about the various love languages, ever since a popular book identified five of them. Some people show that they care through affectionate words and others show their love through cuddles and the like. By this logic, there is a love language called “acts of service,” and… Read More »
Can You Sell Your House If It Legally Belongs To Your Irrevocable Trust?
Protecting your assets from creditor claims from Medicaid during probate is one of the most common and most practical reasons to establish a trust. If you have missed the boat on eligibility for long-term care insurance, then unless you are fabulously wealthy, there is a strong possibility that, one day, you will need to… Read More »
The Self-Consciously Incomplete Estate Plan
The scariest thing about estate planning is that death is forever. How do you make financial plans for all eternity, especially when you will not be around to implement them? It sounds like a thought experiment, the only logical conclusion to which is resignation, like the anticlimactic ending of the Gilgamesh epic, where the… Read More »
Pre-Mortem Probate Is Not An Option In Florida
Some people plan their funerals in such detail that you get the feeling that they wish they could attend their own funeral. They pick out the outfit they want to wear in their open casket, and they have it dry cleaned and hang it in the front of their closet, still wrapped in the… Read More »
401(k) Accounts And Your Estate Plan
Professional financial planners and the personal finance charlatans of the Internet will try to persuade you of all kinds of glamorous ways to invest your money, but like so many other unsung but consistently employed chumps, you know that boring is best. You can’t go wrong with a 401(k) account where you signed up… Read More »
Which Assets Do Not Belong In A Revocable Trust?
The probate courts aim to oversee honest dealings with the estates of recently deceased people. A relative who claims to have a copy of the decedent’s will must submit it to the probate court. This way, anyone who doubts the validity of the will may challenge it and get a judge to rule on… Read More »
The Secret Life Of A Deceased Person’s Estate
The estate of a deceased person has a lot in common with a zombie, when you think about it from a certain perspective. The estate comes into existence only after someone dies, and only because there is unfinished business. It is your job, as the personal representative of the estate, and therefore as the… Read More »
A Brief History Of Trust Law
It is easy to look to the past as a time of creativity, or else of simplicity, that we do not see today. Can anyone alive today recite Beowulf or the Aeneid from memory or craft the stained-glass windows of Notre Dame Cathedral? Do we even stop scrolling long enough to contemplate these things?… Read More »