Dear Clients, Colleagues, and Friends, Sometimes I hear people say, “I don’t need to worry about estate planning – I have my will all drawn up.” I’d much rather see you have a will than no plan at all. But a will-based plan is ideal for only a small number of people. Here are the […]
Dear Clients, Colleagues and Friends, You’ve worked hard. You’ve saved. You’ve thought about insurance and investments carefully, so you will have enough to retire on and to leave something to your kids. Then it happens: you, or your spouse, lose your mental ability to make financial or medical decisions, or one of you dies, and […]
Dear Clients, Colleagues and Friends, Everyone with young children should have a revocable trust as the core of their estate plan. When tragedy strikes and takes one or both parents, a trust provides a legal vessel to hold the assets that will provide for those children, and puts them in the hands of a competent […]
Dear Clients, Colleagues and Friends, A new client recently asked me, somewhat sheepishly, what I thought of LegalZoom. I told him that internet form companies like LegalZoom, RocketLawyer, and Quicken WillMaker are great tools – in the hands of a professional. In the hands of a layperson, they are very dangerous. Form legal documents are […]
Dear Clients, Colleagues and Friends, Our office is working with a client who has worked with her hands all her life. Her last parent died recently after expressing the desire to leave her entire estate, in the high six figures, to our client. The other two children, a wealthy sibling and one with an addiction, […]
Dear Clients, Colleagues and Friends, An older lady came to my office last week accompanied by two of her adult children. Her husband was admitted to a nursing home last fall, and she had been “spending down” their retirement funds at a rate of about $10,000 per month for the past six months. She (and […]
Dear Clients, Colleagues and Friends, Our office is working with two different clients whose parents set up trusts before they passed away. The parents named either siblings or a nephew as trustee of their estate-planning trusts. Now, those relatives are trying to cut our clients out of the inheritance that their parents intended when […]
Dear Colleagues, Friends, and Clients, My wonderful wife Katja and I have been married for eighteen years this summer. Katja came to the United States from Germany at seventeen and fell in love with her adopted land and its people. Eventually, she fell in love with me, too! When we first did our estate […]
In June the U.S. Supreme Court surprised some estate-planning and asset-protection lawyers when it ruled unanimously that inherited Individual Retirement Accounts (IRAs) are NOT exempt from the claims of creditors in bankruptcy. It doesn’t matter, the Court said, whether they are traditional or Roth IRAs. In 2000, Ruth Heffron established a traditional IRA and named […]
Dear Clients, Friends and Colleagues: Not long ago a local father called me in a panic. His son was driving a friend to college. They had gotten into a car crash, and the son was in a coma in another state. The hospital was telling him that decisions needed to be made about the […]