The Plain English Attorney Blog
Far too many attorneys overcomplicate things, making topics convoluted and difficult to understand to the average person. This blog is committed to explaining legal planning topics in an easy to understand format, in plain English. Enjoy the blogs, and please let us know if there is a topic you would like covered.
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A revocable living trust can be one of the best, most effective ways to plan a coordinated estate strategy to avoid probate. However, this type of planning requires some maintenance to make sure your trust is doing everything it can. Too often, people with revocable living trusts go...
With the rising cost of long-term care, families are starting to look more and more at planning for Medicaid to handle those costs. Unfortunately, this has led to a lot of ad hoc transfers based on folk remedies that rarely work out exactly the way they were intended. One of the biggest and...
Far too often, the general public has ideas about estate planning they get from popular television shows, to the point they believe that it is mandatory to have a lawyer read the will to a well-dressed family in front of a roaring fireplace with everyone sipping brandy from large sifter glasses....
When I was young, Friday nights were about Miami Vice. Those of you old enough to remember patiently waiting for your favorite show to come on network or cable television also remember having to plan to be home and not busy when your particular shows were on. When you were home, you...
When it comes to Medicaid Planning, there are tons of loopholes that can help a family preserve a lot of assets and have a loved one still qualify for nursing home Medicaid. On the other hand, this also means there are a lot of opportunities for people to “go rogue” and make mistakes...
This question comes up all of the time when it comes to estate planning. Unfortunately, many attorneys and other professionals try to cram and squish this very subjective square peg into an objective round hole with a sledgehammer. The fact is that there is no simple...
You know a plan is broken into a thousand-piece puzzle when the pages of the trust were taken out of the binder, put back out of order, and some pages are missing. But what happens when the “all-important” (sarcasm inserted here) Schedule A is one of those missing pages? It turns out...
“Well, if you have a Revocable Living Trust, don’t you also need a Will?” the other attorney asked.
“Yeah, you need a Will,” I responded.
“Ah ha!” the other attorney exclaimed, as if he has just made some profound and overriding point to justify his...
One of the most important decisions you can make in estate planning is choosing the right trustees. A frequent question that comes up when speaking with my clients who have younger children is whether or not to name their own parents as trustees. They often believe that naming someone older than...
One of the most expensive estate assets for many families is their home, usually coming in second only to retirement accounts in terms of value. When the house ends up being far and away the most valuable asset in the estate, there are multiple children who are to be treated equally… BUT...
When it comes to estate planning, it comes down to what assets you want to pass along and how it happens. However, the legacies we leave behind are often far more than money. In this broadcast originally to The Plain English Attorney Community, attorney and author Jeffrey G. Marsocci provides a...
When approaching something new and unfamiliar, people tend to think of things like estate planning in the simplest terms possible. However, it’s not like going to the grocery store to buy a gallon of milk where there may be some small differences, but by and large there is not much of a...
