Category: Estate Planning
The estate of a loved one can create a bitter fight that breaks a family apart for a lifetime. But those battles can often be avoided with careful planning. When someone makes an estate plan, the desire to avoid a family battle is often a top priority because, at the end of the fight, family […]
Estate planning attorneys sometimes turn to a no contest clause to possibly avoid estate plan challenges. An inheritance does not always make a recipient happy and it is especially likely to cause dissatisfaction if a sibling believes they have not been treated fairly. Traditionally, there was not much that could be done to prevent these […]
The funding of a trust is necessary if you set it up as part of your estate plan but not all of your assets necessarily belong in the trust. As you go through the process of setting up an estate plan with an “irrevocable trust” or a “revocable trust,” it is important to remember that […]
Wisconsin is the latest state to take a close look at the impact of the digital world on estate planning. The digital age has had a major impact on every aspect of our lives, including estate planning – which was created at a time when paper and physical property ruled. The laws created at that […]
As the Baby Boom generation ages and begins to require assistance from their own children, they discover that their children are already busy giving assistance to their own children. Many of the generation caught in-between now find themselves “sandwiched.” The author of an article recently featured in the Washington Post explains how the Baby Boomers’ […]
Heirloom archaeology has been created by a non-profit group as it attempts to return heirlooms to families. A non-profit organization out of Nashville run by Chris Hodge has taken on the difficult task of doing detective work to find the living descendants of the owners of various heirlooms and return them to their rightful owners. […]
The biggest reason that approximately 75% of Americans do not have any form of advanced medical directives is they really don’t know what those are. An advanced medical directive, sometimes known as a health care proxy, which is a legal document you can execute to speak for you regarding your medical treatment if you are […]
A St. Louis case demonstrates how a blended family can be a challenge for estate planning. Both millionaires when they married in 1980, Mary Lee and Robert Hermann Sr., who had children from previous marriages, signed a prenuptial agreement aimed at protecting their own respective children. According to the Riverfront Times in “In Probate Court, […]
While payable-on-death accounts seem to be an easy answer for transfers they do not come without challenges. Payable-on-Death accounts, sometimes called Pay-on-Death or Transfer-on-Death, seem to be easy and therefore a popular method for transferring assets after the account owner dies. But this approach to estate planning must be carefully considered. The money in the […]
The deadline to file the basis for property distributed from an estate by Section 6035 of the tax code is extended by the IRS. The Surface Transportation and Veteran’s Health Care Choice Improvement Act of 2015 was signed into law last summer with a provision unrelated to the act which required that people filing an […]
