It has been said that young adults without significant assets do not need a will. In response, I present an interview with my friend “F”. F is in her mid-20s. She has full-time employment and also runs a side photography business. She is single and childless, but she has a serious boyfriend. Her divorced parents…
Excuse me; may I interrupt your self-imposed blog posting hiatus? Sure, what’s up? You once said that every adult needs an estate plan. Isn’t that a bunch of hooey? I mean, if you go to a financial planner, you hear “everyone needs a financial plan.” If you go to an insurance salesman, you hear that…
“You see my husband as a saint, so he must be right in everything he says and does. And then you see him as a devil, and everything he says and does must be wrong. Well, my husband is neither a saint nor a devil. He’s just a human being and he makes mistakes.” Read…
NOTE: I am proud to announce that my post below also appears in the January 2012 edition of the WealthCounsel Quarterly Newsletter, linked here. While written mainly for estate planning practitioners, this overview is also hopefully helpful to anyone with any digital assets. Enjoy, and Happy New Year! Read more...
It is certainly easy for the estate planning lawyer to say that every adult needs at least a will. But if we think about it, does the single person with few assets really need an estate plan at all? Read more...
I asked my young kids today if they knew what “abatement” was. They replied, “Yes, Daddy, it’s the bottom floor in our house where all our toys and boxes and other stuff is!” To avoid the stigma of negligent parenting, I explained to them that within the estate planning context, abatement is the forced decrease…
According to the law of averages, approximately 1 in 500 people in the United States who are aged 25-44 will die this year. In other words, 499 out of every 500 in this group will be around in 2012. So why on earth do estate planning attorneys, financial planners, insurance salesmen, etc. recommend that anyone…
![By George Wythe [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons](http://estateplanninginfoblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/George_Wythe_will_1806-100x150.jpg)
Today, let’s take a post to broadly work through the clauses that are in a typical will. Why? To remove some of the mystery and to show you how such a document is effective and even essential. Read more...
The first three minutes of the latest episode of The Simpsons, “Flaming Moe“, introduced a slew of interesting estate planning themes. Spoiler alert: I reveal here these three minutes of the plot, which is then relegated to barely an afterthought for the remainder of the episode. Read more...
Today, we continue our discussion of probate and the executor’s duties. In Part I, we discussed what happens if a named executor does not want to serve. In Part II, we discussed inventories, the executor’s duty to control the estate’s assets, and the potential for the estate representative to suffer personal liability. In this post,…
