Plain-spoken answers to the questions families ask us. These articles are educational material, not legal advice, and shouldn’t be relied on as legal counsel.
In this blog, we’ve tackled a lot of subjects relating to testamentary documents: what they are, why you need them, what goes into them, and why it is so important to get yours written in legally correct form. Now let’s tackle a few familiar human problems in relations to wills.
It’s an online world. Increasingly, people communicate, bank, work, shop and play online. This blog is evidence of our digitally centered world. After all, you’re reading this on a screen, not from a piece of paper that came in the mail with our articles in it.
As a companion piece to our blogs on living trusts, let’s focus on what is known in the estate planning world as the ILIT: the irrevocable life insurance trust.
Failing to update your estate planning documents and financial accounts after divorce. With a divorce rate ranging from fifty to sixty percent these days, it truly can happen to any marriage.
We see this situation all too often with our trust administration clients. A married couple was proactive early in their lives and properly created an estate plan with a revocable living trust; but unfortunately, after the first spouse died, the trust was not properly administered.
With summer fast approaching, Kelly Phillips Erb dedicated one of her recent Forbes Taxgirl columns to the tax considerations of buying a vacation property. This is very timely for our blog, because along with tax benefits and considerations, owning a vacation home or second home also has estate planning considerations.
You’ve finally decided to venture out on your own and start your company. Congratulations! The next big decision to make is choosing what type of corporate entity you should be. There are many different corporate entities available; you just have to make sure whichever one you choose is right for your business.
These days, divorce is a fairly common occurrence. And here in southern California, celebrity divorce is a frequent topic in all forms of media. Singers, actors, rappers, athletes…unhappy couples are announcing their split-ups practically every day.
A lot of estate planning relates to money. Money is an asset that can be bequeathed, donated, or placed in a trust. Beneficiaries receive payment, in a manner of speaking. But what about executors? When choosing an executor, you must ask yourself some variation of these questions: Whom do I trust absolutely?
Do you know what happens if a person designates someone as a beneficiary in their will, or a trust, and that beneficiary dies before the owner of the will/trustmaker does?
It occurred to me that one area I have not really explored in my blog covers estates, executors, and Letters Testamentary. These are just a few of the various topics relating to probate in California. Most of my blogs have focused on the elements of California estate plans, and on estate planning in general.
An international tragedy – and mystery – still very much in the news is the still-unsolved disappearance of the Malaysia Airlines plane, and the search for answers continues in the Indian Ocean near Australia.