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How Well Do You Know Your Power of Attorney?
Imagine for a moment that you (or you and your spouse) are in a car accident, knocked on the head, and suffer brain injuries great enough to put you into a coma for 2 weeks and require a full seven months of nursing and rehabilitative care. Thankfully, you make a full recovery of all your […]
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When Should I Update My Estate Plan?
As an estate planning attorney, I often get asked the following question: “when should I review and update my estate plan?” Well, you may think that you are one of the smart ones: You already have an estate plan that you and your spouse created back in 1996; it’s sitting snugly in a safety deposit […]
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E-mail, Twitter, Pay Pal—Oh My! How to Protect Your Online Assets
E-mail, blog, iTunes, social networking, online photo albums… more and more of our lives and our businesses are moving online, but what happens to that online life when you pass away? Will your accounts languish, becoming an easy mark for hackers? Eventually be deleted? Perhaps they’ll be passed to your spouse after petitioning the court […]
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Proposed Restrictions on Estate Planning Tools Could Impact Your Family
There are many estate planning techniques available to a family that wants to protect assets to pass on to the children or grandchildren; options that extend far beyond a simple will, and even beyond a basic living trust. Two of these effective but lesser-known techniques are the Grantor Retained Annuity Trust (GRAT) and the Family […]
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Don’t Let Hospital Procedures Leave You In The Dark
If you or a loved one has spent any time in hospitals recently then you know that they operate under strict rules regarding privacy; rules that, according to this post by Tara Parker-Pope, can seem difficult or unfair. These rules prevent hospital staff from sharing information about patients (even with extended family members), and in […]
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Obama Administration Proposes Elimination of Estate Tax “Loopholes”
The government has plans for your children’s inheritance. The particulars of the estate tax have been in flux, and have been the subject of much debate over the past few years, with the only constant being that there always is an estate tax. And now the Obama administration is proposing more changes to the estate […]
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Maria Shriver and HBO: Bringing Alzheimer’s out of the Back Room and into the Living Room
Every 70 seconds someone is diagnosed with Alzheimer’s 5.3 million people are currently suffering from Alzheimer’s Alzheimer’s is now the sixth leading cause of death There are 9.9 million unpaid caregivers in America One in eight people over the age of 65 suffers from Alzheimer’s (from the Alzheimer’s Association’s 2009 Alzheimer’s Disease Facts and Figures) […]
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How Far Would You Go To Control Your Heirs?
A trust is one of the most flexible and most powerful estate planning tools, and not just for avoiding unnecessary estate taxes. Many of the clients who come through our office choose to create trusts for other reasons as well; namely to protect their heirs from predators, creditors, and sometimes even from themselves. Sometimes a […]
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Procrastination is Not a Planning Tool
We did two estate planning seminars this week to a lovely group of audience. As I emphasized during the presentations, the number one reason that people die without protecting their assets or their heirs is not that they lack the money to create an estate plan, and it’s not that they don’t know that they […]
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An Estate Plan Can Help “Keep the Peace” When Parents Remarry
Nothing, it seems, has the potential to cause a fight over inheritance quite like a second marriage. The Wall Street Journal’s SmartMoney magazine, in an article entitled Before Your Parents Say ‘I Do’ Again says that poor estate planning (or even worse, no estate planning) can cause terrible damage to family relationships: “As Americans live […]
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