My inspiration for today’s post comes from this recent article in the New York Times about debt relief firms, and a few questions I was asked by a prospective client. As a former consumer debtor lawyer who represented many good families through bankruptcy proceedings in the 1980s and 1990s, I have an intense dislike for [...]
Is your estate planner a trusted advisor or a guerilla problem solver? Does he see you as a person or merely a bank account? All too often lawyers or others billing themselves as “estate planners” perceive that you want the lowest cost, lowest maintenance product available so you can feel comforted that you have [...]
Who would you like to have with you when you are ill or injured in the hospital? Most likely you would hope to have your partner of many years there with you to hold your hand when things get rough. Although many of us take for granted that we would be allowed that luxury, until [...]
When fewer than half of all adult Americans have estate plans, you must ask yourself: why? One answer is that many people think they have already taken care of how their assets will pass to their heirs through joint tenancy. Joint tenancy works well if nothing out of the ordinary exists or occurs; but there [...]
In my last blog post I promised to give some concrete examples of why an updated trust is better than one that simply keeps the “status quo”. I will forgo the obvious examples such as inheriting money or growing your assets so that your original plan will no longer work. I’ll also skip over the [...]
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 [...]