If you are facing a serious medical diagnosis, follow these tips on crucial documents that will enable you to take back control of your future, ensure that your wishes are honored, and prevent difficult decisions about finances, healthcare, and guardianship from falling to your loved ones during a crisis.
While your estate plan may describe in detail who will receive big-ticket items, your loved ones may argue over small nostalgic items that you unintentionally omitted. To prevent family strife and forestall bickering among your loved ones, you also need to think in a big-picture way about the little things in your estate.
Among the numerous types of trusts aimed at fulfilling different estate planning purposes, an inheritor’s trust is specially designed to help protect an inheritance.
If you and your partner choose not to marry, you must have an estate plan tailored to your individual situation. Without an estate plan, your partner generally has no legal authority to make decisions for you if you become injured or incapacitated (unable to manage your own affairs) or to inherit from you when you pass away.
An estate plan can ensure that a foster child is legally protected and provided for on your terms. With it, you can ensure that your foster child is yours in the eyes of the law every bit as much as in your heart.
Parents generally try to treat all their children fairly. We often assume that fairness means leaving an equal inheritance to each child. However, “fair” does not always mean “equal.”
Most people think of probate (the process of collecting, managing, and distributing a deceased person’s money and property) as a private process. However, because probate involves the court system, most filings become a matter of public record.
When thinking through their estate plan and how they want their assets managed after they pass away, most parents wish to treat their children equally, often out of a sense of fairness. However, sometimes being fair or doing what is right by your children may mean giving unequal inheritances.
Simultaneous death laws, such as the Uniform Simultaneous Death Act (USDA), enacted in 1940 and updated in 1993, were created to resolve legal uncertainties when two or more people die at the same time or close in time to each other and the order of death is unclear.
Once you are married, you will be uniquely situated to provide meaningful support for your spouse after your passing through special estate planning tools available only to legally married individuals.