All children are a blessing. From the day they are born, you begin making plans to ensure that your child or grandchild has a bright future. What will their interests be? What job will they have? Who will they marry? While these are common concerns for most families, for those with child or grandchild with special […]
Preparing for one’s passing is stressful enough, but it can be aggravated by worries regarding the validity of a will. Individuals want to ensure that they are leaving something behind for their loved ones, and it would be impossible to properly distribute their property if the court does not find their will to be valid. Today, […]
One of the main reasons for getting an annual check up with your doctor is to detect and treat problems before an illness or health condition becomes serious. Likewise, it is important for your estate plan to get a regular check up to address changes in your life circumstances or in the law to ensure that […]
On December 20, 2019, President Trump signed the Setting Every Community Up for Retirement Enhancement Act (SECURE Act), which became effective on January 1, 2020. The Act is the most impactful legislation affecting retirement accounts in decades. It will have a positive impact for many older Americans but could have negative tax consequences for many beneficiaries […]
The internet offers all the information and tools we need at our fingertips to create our own estate plan, right? For most people, this is simply not true. Several years ago, Consumer Reports®, an independent nonprofit consumer watchdog group, created wills using the forms provided by DIY websites and asked three law professors to review them. […]
According to the Pew Research Center, in 2017, there were 44.4 million foreign-born people living in the United States, 55% of whom were non-citizens As a result, there are many occasions when a non-citizen may be the beneficiary of the estate of a U.S. citizen, for example, if the non-citizen immigrant married a U.S. citizen. There […]
Bankruptcy may be one of the last things on your mind when you are creating an estate plan. Fortunately, the number of bankruptcy filings have declined as the economy has improved, but there were still a whopping 773,361 bankruptcy filings in the United States during the 12-month period ending June 30, 2019, according to statistics released […]
The structure of families has changed in the United States: According to statistics cited by the Pew Research Center, six out of ten women who remarry are in blended families, and in about half of those remarriages, stepchildren live with the remarried couple. If you or your grown children are part of a blended family, your […]
