It happened again. After telling the audience at a recent seminar that trusts really are living documents that need to be updated periodically, I was approached by several attendees afterward asking if I really meant their trust needed to be updated. After all, they only want to make minor changes; they don’t need anything [...]
Does your estate plan include a digital Will? Last night while I was having dinner with a friend who also works in the legal world, talk turned to the digital age, and one of our dinner partners remarked about how interesting it was that our friend had recently moved and had acquired modern technology like [...]
Social capital is the money or time you contribute to worthy causes that improve society. A favorite saying around charitable causes is the phrase “give or get” which means members can either contribute an amount of money toward the goal or they can go out and raise that sum of money from people they know. [...]
Back in December I blogged about estate planning not being about money and described the beginning of a journey to find the legacy you want to leave to your children, today I’m going to write about another part of that journey… finding your own voice. Part of finding your legacy means looking for and putting [...]
I recently described the marvelous manner in which George Washington used a simple bequest of his swords to express his devotion to freedom and liberty and to instill those values in those who followed. His Last Will and Testament also stands as a shining beacon of how failure to think through consequences and the [...]
At a recent symposium, the presenter described the almost magical way the father of our country turned his bequests of personal property into a legacy that lasted generations. He described the portion of Washington’s Will that bequeathed his swords to his nephews. Instead of a simple listing of the items and the recipients, he [...]
I know this title seems strange. Almost everyone thinks they need an estate plan to insure the comfortable transition of their money. With few exceptions, I feel that my clients are burdened with the prospect of making decisions about how to pass along their accumulated wealth. It drives home the point of why the [...]
In my last blog post I described the emotional and practical reasons why there is so much probate litigation and how to hire an experienced probate litigator; in this post I’ll mention some common contested probate allegations and measures that can be taken to avoid them or to keep them from spiraling out of [...]
Probate litigation is a burgeoning and fertile practice area for lawyers. There are many reasons why probate cases spawn litigation, but most grow from inadequate or defective estate plans nurtured by emotional dissatisfaction or greed. As an estate planner since 1979, I encourage my clients to create an estate plan that takes into consideration [...]
I am a trust based estate planning attorney. That means for a variety of reasons, I believe that most clients are best served if the centerpiece of their estate plan is a trust. However, that said, a friend who recommends my services to his clients recently complained that after extolling the virtues of trusts [...]