You did the right thing for your family. You sat down and drew up a will. Maybe you saw the WillMaker program on sale at Costco, or maybe you said, "I drew up my will 30 years ago and like it the way it is, and I don’t need to pay no stinkin' lawyer to [...]
I am often asked by probate clients and estate planning clients why two individuals have to watch the signing of a will. I have had clients ask me if a notary acknowledgement alone is sufficient. The answer is that wills executed in California must follow strict guidelines. A notarization alone will not make a will [...]
I think some people believe that if someone can’t sign their name or read due to a physical disability, they can’t create an estate plan. That is simply not the case. The law allows a person to execute documents by making a mark. The legal capacity to sign with a mark instead of a signature [...]
I never would have thought I would be talking about this problem, but I have come across it recently. Some mortuaries and funeral homes are holding a loved one’s remains—not for safekeeping because no one claimed the remains, but because the family isn’t able to pay the balance due on the mortuary bill. For many [...]
I was reading yet another sad story about a family that set up a sloppy estate plan. The plan involved a mother and four children. The mother had a bank account with roughly $400,000 in it, and she was going to split the cash into four equal shares. However, for lack of better judgment, the [...]
I was just reading a legal question-and-answer site about a family who could not find their estate planning documents. They wanted to know what to do. Apparently, the family had done their estate planning quite a while ago, and the relative in question had just passed away. Now the family is furiously tearing up the [...]
On a legal website, I recently read a question asked by a child who wanted to know what is going to happen to her mother’s estate when she died. The child mentioned that the county, through a public guardian, had a conservatorship over the mother. The child also stated that the county had created a [...]
I was recently reviewing a living trust estate plan for an individual. The plan had been outdated for quite some time. As I was reviewing this individual’s plan, I noticed that most of the plan was from the 1990s. But the pages were not all the same color or format, which indicated that pages had [...]
You may be wondering, Do I need to put my cars in my living trust? Here’s the short answer: if you are talking about the cars you use every day to go to and from work, you probably do not need to bother going down to the DMV and changing your ownership records. After all, [...]
One of the key tenements of estate planning is making your wishes known about who you want to raise your children if something were to happen to you as a parent. No one wants to think about a morbid situation like this. But your decision can be the key difference between choosing who you want [...]
