Desert Law Group Blog

• Posted in: Current Affairs

While I was up in the San Francisco Bay Area last week, I sat and watched the moving memorial of Senator Ted Kennedy.  Whether you agreed with his politics, the recent death of Ted Kennedy has given us an opportunity to reflect on the unique nature of trusts not only […]

• Posted in: Probate

We acquire so many assets over the course of our lives now—bank accounts, stocks, real property, life insurance, retirement, and more—it’s sometimes confusing to know what has to go through probate and what doesn’t. The answer to the question above is: life insurance and retirement benefits do not have to […]

• Posted in: Elder Law

A recent study about how divorce may affect your health has been making the rounds in the news sources lately. This article discusses how the added stress of divorce, family upheaval, and tighter finances can be so detrimental to your health that the effects can last years into the future. […]

• Posted in: Estate Planning

What is your estate plan all about? Is it about saving your assets from estate tax, or is it about leaving an inheritance for your children? Or is it something even beyond that—providing for your own financial security during your life, thus enabling you to leave a lasting legacy for […]

• Posted in: Probate

For a subject with which everybody is at least peripherally familiar, probate can turn confusing and frightening when you are forced to become intimately acquainted with it. As a beneficiary, probate can be lengthy, expensive and frustrating; but if you have been named as executor, probate can suddenly become an […]

• Posted in: Retirement Planning

Planning for retirement often requires a fine-tuned equation including such variables as where you plan to live, how many years you’ve worked and how much social security you can expect, health care expectations, long-term care, and especially your life expectancy. Well, part of that equation is about to change, because […]

• Posted in: Estate Planning

Parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles often come into our offices to make estate plans, and one of the questions they ask is how they can support the people in their lives who have special needs. Special needs can include anything from Autism or Down Syndrome to Paralysis or blindness, and […]

• Posted in: General interest

We’ve all been learning a lot more lately about economics and investment practices than we ever thought we would… but do these lessons from the global economy transfer to the family circle? Studies have shown that most families have one person who takes care of all the finances: paying the […]

• Posted in: Estate Planning

Some of the clients who come through our offices are parents and grandparents of small children whose primary goal in creating an estate plan is to protect those children. This includes providing for their immediate financial needs, ensuring they will have the means to receive an education, and so forth, […]

• Posted in: Probate

Tolstoy said that “happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way,” but sometimes even the most stable and happy of families can turn angry and litigious when death and property is involved. It never ceases to be surprising how many seemingly strong family relationships […]