Why I Hate Probate: When Bureaucracy Beats Common Sense
Probate Bureaucracy I hate probate, and I’ve hated it for a very long time. That doesn’t mean probate serves no legitimate purpose, because there are certainly situations where court supervision protects beneficiaries, forces accountability, or resolves disputes that otherwise might never get settled. What I hate is what happens when the process stops being about […]
Don’t Let Life Insurance Wreck Your Trust
Life Insurance Beneficiary: One of the biggest mistakes I see with revocable living trusts doesn’t happen when the trust is drafted. It happens later, when someone changes how an asset is titled or changes a beneficiary designation without realizing that they may be undoing part of the estate plan. A trust can be drafted perfectly, […]
Selling A HOUSE After Death
Selling a House – Probate VS Trust A few years ago, I received a call from a family that had been referred to me by one of my existing clients. Their father had recently passed away, leaving behind a Will that divided his estate equally among his six children. Unfortunately, life had already complicated that […]
Why Some Assets Avoid Probate… And Others Don’t
“But Mom and Dad Had a Trust.” I hear that sentence all the time, and honestly, I understand why families are confused when they say it. Two exhausted adult children sat across from me in my conference room after losing both of their parents within a relatively short period of time. Their parents had done […]
The Form That Destroys Your Estate Plan
Avoid Probate – Plan Your Estate When people hear “avoid probate,” the natural reaction is to start adding pay-on-death (POD) or transfer-on-death (TOD) beneficiary designations to every account they own. And to be fair, beneficiary designations do have a place in a well-coordinated estate plan. The problem is when those designations become the plan. At […]
The 4–10% Cost No One Warns You About After You Die
Is That Because of Probate? For a long time, estate planning was driven by one primary concern: estate taxes. If your estate was large enough, the question was how much the government was going to take and what you could do to reduce that number. If your estate was not large enough, many people assumed […]