Category: Estate Planning

If you didn’t know better, you might think that Memorial Day is all about heading to the beach, eating hotdogs, and scoring a good deal on a new mattress. Advertisers have taken what was once an opportunity to remember our deceased soldiers and our relatives who passed before us, and turned it into...

Do you know how much money you will get from Social Security if you retire or become disabled in the near future? You could access that information in a matter of seconds if you had my Social Security account.My Social Security is an online portal the Social Security Administration (SSA) has...

Cryptocurrency and Estate PlanningBitcoin, Litecoin, Ethereum, Zcash, Dash, Ripple, Monero… these aren’t just a bunch of made-up words, they are the most popular forms of cryptocurrency. They are a making waves in the financial world and creating interesting challenges for estate planners.If you die with a shoebox of cash hidden...

There is an old Polish saying that roughly translates, “Not my circus, not my monkeys.” It is a reminder that one need not get involved with every messy situation one comes upon, and should not take responsibility for controlling or changing a volatile or delicate situation out of one’s sphere of influence. The phrase...

When you meet someone new, the conversation usually covers the same general topics: family and careers. We love bragging about our family as much as the next person. But when the conversation comes around to what we do for a living, we are much more cautious about sharing our passion. A lot of people...

The Titanic didn’t have enough lifeboats for all its passengers because the ship was “unsinkable.” The Mars orbiter was lost because some engineers used the metric system while others used the English system. Decca Records turned down the Beatles because they weren't sellable. No mistake you make will ever be a bad as...

The odds are good that you have read the book or saw the movie adaptation of To Kill a Mockingbird. Harper Lee’s coming-of-age classic has a perennial spot on summer reading lists, and in the hearts of many attorneys who view Atticus Finch as a fictional role model.When a follow-up, Go Set...

When Mary’s parents passed away, Mary inherited the house she grew up in. And everything in it. Figuring out what to do with her family’s “treasures” was more work, and more rewarding, then she could ever have imagined. Assisting her with the task gave our firm a crash course on archiving with an...

2017 was a big year in the art world. A Saudi prince bought Leonardo da Vinci’s Salvator Mundi for $450 million. And a painting by Jean-Michel Basquiat, which was bought by a Japanese collector for over $110 million, bumped Andy Warhol from the top spot on the list of most expensive American artists. It...

When President Trump was running for office, he vowed to get rid of the estate tax. The “Tax Cuts and Jobs Act” he signed into law in December doesn’t manage to do that, but it does make a few changes that will impact large estates.The...