Imagine for a moment that you (or you and your spouse) are in a car accident, knocked on the head, and suffer brain injuries great enough to put you into a coma for 2 weeks and require a full seven months of nursing and rehabilitative care. Thankfully, you make a full recovery of all your… Read More »
Blog Posts Page 54
You Ought To Be In Pictures: When and How To Create A Video Will
The process of creating a last will and testament hasn’t changed much over the centuries, and the requirements are few: Paper, pen, witnesses, and a testator who is of sound mind. This endurance and simplicity is one of the hallmarks of estate planning—and yet there are plenty of ways to incorporate technology into our practices… Read More »
When Should I Update My Estate Plan?
You’re one of the smart ones: You already have an estate plan that you and your spouse created it back in 1996; it’s sitting snugly in a safety deposit box, gathering dust until the (hopefully) far-off day when it will be needed. You’re done, right? Wrong. Kudos to you if you’ve already created your estate… Read More »
E-mail, Twitter, Pay Pal—Oh My! How to Protect Your Online Assets
E-mail, blog, iTunes, social networking, online photo albums… more and more of our lives and our businesses are moving online, but what happens to that online life when you pass away? Will your accounts languish, becoming an easy mark for hackers? Eventually be deleted? Perhaps they’ll be passed to your spouse after petitioning the court… Read More »
Don’t Let Hospital Procedures Leave You In The Dark
If you or a loved one has spent any time in hospitals recently then you know that they operate under strict rules regarding privacy; rules that, according to this post by Tara Parker-Pope, can seem difficult or unfair. These rules prevent hospital staff from sharing information about patients (even with extended family members), and in… Read More »
Maria Shriver and HBO: Bringing Alzheimer’s out of the Back Room and into the Living Room
Every 70 seconds someone is diagnosed with Alzheimer’s 5.3 million people are currently suffering from Alzheimer’s Alzheimer’s is now the sixth leading cause of death There are 9.9 million unpaid caregivers in America One in eight people over the age of 65 suffers from Alzheimer’s (from the Alzheimer’s Association’s 2009 Alzheimer’s Disease Facts and… Read More »
How Far Would You Go To Control Your Heirs?
A trust is one of the most flexible and most powerful estate planning tools, and not just for avoiding unnecessary estate taxes. Many of the clients who come through our office choose to create trusts for other reasons as well; namely to protect their heirs from predators, creditors, and sometimes even from themselves. Sometimes a… Read More »
Obama Administration Proposes Elimination of Estate Tax “Loopholes”
The government has plans for your children’s inheritance. The particulars of the estate tax have been in flux, and have been the subject of much debate over the past few years, with the only constant being that there always is an estate tax. And now the Obama administration is proposing more changes to the estate… Read More »
Procrastination is Not a Planning Tool
The number one reason that people die without protecting their assets or their heirs is not that they lack the money to create an estate plan, and it’s not that they don’t know that they need one, or how to create one—It’s procrastination. Most people who die without an estate plan in place do so… Read More »
An Estate Plan Can Help “Keep the Peace” When Parents Remarry
Nothing, it seems, has the potential to cause a fight over inheritance quite like a second marriage. The Wall Street Journal’s SmartMoney magazine, in an article entitled Before Your Parents Say ‘I Do’ Again, says that poor estate planning (or even worse, no estate planning) can cause terrible damage to family relationships: “As Americans live… Read More »