Category Archives: Estate Planning
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 »
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 »
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 »
You Are Not Too Young To Lock Into Your Year End Estate Plan
Our generation has gotten a raw deal. The promises of financial stability that so many people in our parents’ generation grew up with now seem out of reach, or at least so uncertain that it seems naïve, if not irresponsible, to sink so much energy into pursuing them. Neither you nor any of your… Read More »
Probate For Misanthropes
Some people can only persuade themselves to work on their estate plans by telling themselves that death and what comes after it is a party. Old age is the phase of your life where you gleefully cross items off your bucket list. People have euphemistically been calling funerals, “celebrations of life” for decades, but… Read More »
Pet Trusts Make Perfect Sense If You Apply The Law Wisely
The family members who allege that you get along better with animals than you do with people probably have a point, but your animal friends are much easier to get along with than your human relatives. If you don’t write a will, your closest surviving family members will inherit all your property when you… Read More »
Your Blended Family Is Not Complete Without An Estate Plan
We have all heard lurid stories about widows feuding with their stepchildren over their late husbands’ estate. Both sides accuse the other of using the decedent for his money, in life and in death. Usually, there is more to the story than that, though. Yes, sometimes neither side really cares about the money; they… Read More »
Placing Your House In A Trust Could Be Your Last Chance For Generational Wealth
You have heard it all before about how people who do not consider themselves rich can still benefit from establishing a trust, but certainly those people have more money than you do. In more innocent times, you considered yourself middle class, but all of the trappings of middle-class life are slipping away from you…. Read More »