Estate Planning, Probate, Power of Attorney Blogs & More

• 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 your family? Estate planning—or what […]

• 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 overwhelming maze of deadlines, notifications […]

• 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 according to U.S. News and […]

• 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 everything in between. Our clients […]

• 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 bills, setting aside money for […]

• 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, but often the very first […]

• 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 devolve into backbiting and grudge-holding […]

• Posted in: Current Affairs

There seems to be a lot of fear around President Obama’s proposed healthcare reforms, most of that fear centering on the end-of-life planning included in the proposal. As a firm that deals with elder law issues, it is important to us that our clients be informed about their choices as to health care and end-of-life […]

• Posted in: Elder Law

I just returned from a week-long legal conference in Chicago.  Several classes attended were focused on long term care planning and the available options. According to a study done by the AARP over 34 million people provide care to ill or disabled adults aged 50 or over, and with the aging baby boomer population (and […]

• Posted in: Estate Planning

August is upon us, the summer is drawing to a close, and the school year is about to begin. For many parents this means it’s time to fill out the beginning of school paperwork again: health, release, and emergency contact forms. Although many parents look upon these forms as a time-consuming necessary evil, they can […]