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Funding; the Final Frontier
You’ve met with an attorney, you’ve signed a trust, and you’ve brought copies of it home with you in a nice-looking binder . . . Now what? Are you done? Well, not quite. The very last step of completing an estate plan is to fund your trust. Funding is the process of putting all of your property […]
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World Elder Abuse Awareness Day
Do you know anyone who has been the victim of elder abuse? As the pre-baby-boom generation ages, and as the cost of healthcare rises, so do the numbers of elder abuse victims rise as well. Elder abuse encompasses many things, from targeting the elderly in a bank or credit card scam, to the physical abuse […]
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Divorce and Estate Planning
Most of us, when we think about divorce, tend to think about people in court, couples fighting, and moving trucks pulling away from the family home; very few people going through a divorce think about their estate plan. But the fact is that you may well need to or want to put your signature on […]
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Religion and Your Healthcare Directive
I always explain to our clients that their Advance Healthcare Directive is a very personal document. It is because it details your wishes for your personal care, including your desire for pain relief, blood transfusions, and life-saving procedures, just to name a few. But it doesn’t have to stop there; your Advance Healthcare Directive can also be […]
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There’s No Time Like the Present
You may have read in one of our previous posts about some of the various options available for distribution of your personal property after your death. Apparently, our firm and our readers are not the only people thinking about the possibility of such a scenario. Anne Tergesen, in her article Divvying Up the Silver, writes […]
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Tackling the Tough Topics
“Age is a high price to pay for maturity” – Tom Stoppard Aging is not a common topic of conversation in our culture. Just look at our movies and television shows and you can see that they are very youth-focused, even our commercials tell us how to stay younger longer. With all this focus on […]
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In the Unlikely Event of an Emergency. . .
If you have thought about your final wishes at all, you have probably thought about who you want to be the beneficiary of your property upon your death; your spouse, your children, or maybe your grandchildren. But as estate planning attorneys, we will ask you to think a little beyond that, to plan for what […]
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Expecting the Unexpected
I recently visited a friend in the hospital. The visit reminded me that we plan for vacations, we plan for retirement, but sometimes the most important thing to plan for is the one you don’t know is coming. Very few of us expect to have an extended stay in the hospital, but this shouldn’t stop […]
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Good Fences Make. . . Good Partners?
Business partners often end up with strong friendships, but is it possible for friends to succeed as business partners? It would seem to be a natural evolution; you know each other, you like each other, enjoy spending time together, and work well together. But the transition from friends to partners may not be as easy […]
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Redefining the “To Do” List
If you’re like me, you probably have “To Do” lists filled with tasks like ‘pay the bills’ or ‘wash the car’, but how many of those lists evoke a feeling of heavy obligation rather than pleasant anticipation? If you were to take your list of “Things to Do” and add onto the end of it […]
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