A lot of people come into my office and ask me if they should transfer their real estate into their kid's name while they are still living. Here is the typical reason they give for wanting to do that: If my child goes on the title to the property, (1) I save money by not [...]
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 recently came across a question by a father. He wanted to know how to protect his inheritance that he wanted to leave to his son and daughter. The father had acquired about four rental properties and wanted to give his son and daughter two properties each. All the properties had no mortgages and were [...]
I was just reading a legal question-and-answer website about a couple who was dating and wanted to know when they needed to update their wills. The couple has a basic will plan, but they plan on getting married and having kids within the next few years. It sounds like this couple is on the ball [...]
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, [...]
