What is Heirs Land?

Unless you work in real estate, you’ve probably never heard of heirs land and the complicated problems it can cause when the person who thinks they own the property wants to use it as collateral in a transaction or sell it on the open market. Heirs land, quite simply, is land that passed via intestate…

How do Prenups Work with Estate Plans?

When you think of estate planning, you may not think about prenuptial agreements and how they interact and impact your estate. However, they have increasingly become an important part of estate planning as lawyers must make sure plans take into account existing prenups and outline where such documents should be created in the future. A…

Can an Estate Handle a Lawsuit?

Death is often unexpected and can come while someone is busy with their lives, caring for family, running their business, and even when they’re working on a lawsuit. Sometimes, after someone has passed away, their assets or their passing itself becomes the object of a lawsuit. So how is the estate involved in these lawsuits…

What is Ancillary Probate?

Over the course of a lifetime, individuals and couples generally amass wealth in the form of securities, accounts, real property, and personal property. While much of this can be located in the state in which they reside at death, real property, in particular, can easily be located in a different state. In this case, in…

Guardianship vs Conservatorship

Guardianship and Conservatorship are often associated with estate planning because there are two groups of people who are likely to be involved in a guardianship or conservatorship: the elderly and minor children who lose their parents. Guardianship and conservatorship are a legal process designed to protect individuals who are not legally competent to care for…

Choosing Your Trustee

Part of setting up a large estate often includes setting up a family trust or a series of trusts that will help you accomplish your different goals. These trusts can provide for a spouse during their lifetime and then have children and grandchildren as beneficiaries. You can also set up charitable trusts and foundations to…

Placing Assets into a Trust

As part of your estate plan, your attorney may suggest setting up and funding a trust. There are a number of different types of trusts you can set up, each with their own unique advantages, but one similarity between all trusts is that assets must be placed into the trusts in order to get the…

New Year, New Gift Exemption

Every year, the IRS announces the estate and gift tax limits as well as the gift tax exemption. The gift tax exemption is the value you can gift to any other individual without that individual facing tax consequences for that gift. This year, the gift exemption remains at $15,000, though the estate tax limit went…

Estate Planning for a Mixed Family

Life throws curveballs and you may find yourself with a mixed family, a spouse, an ex-spouse or two, children from each spouse, adopted children, and other loved ones, all of whom you want to remember in your estate. Regular intestate succession and even simple wills are not designed to handle blended families and the complicated…