That’s right, the estate tax is officially repealed for this year and this year alone. What this means is that if anyone dies in 2010, no matter how much money they leave to their heirs, no one will have to pay taxes on that money (there’s a caveat to this in Massachusetts, but we’ll explore…
It’s December of 2009, a time to celebrate the holidays and thoughts of buying gifts dominate the holiday season. You might think about electronics or toys or gift cards, but it is the end of the year that some of you should be thinking about gifting money – large amounts of it. For those that…
One of the hardest parts of putting together an estate plan is deciding who should take over for you if you can’t care for yourself. Who do you want to be your health care proxy? Most people immediately think of their closest family member – whether that be your parents, your children or your spouse….
You’re ready to see your lawyer about having a will and possibly a trust document drafted. Before meeting with your lawyer, you need to spend a bit of time to gather all the documents necessary for your lawyer to give you sound and complete advice about what estate planning documents he needs to draft for…
Many of us have pets and we treat them as part of the family. As some of you might know, I have 2 rabbits and I treat them like my children. I care about my rabbits so much so that I keep a blog for them. So when you did your estate plan (assuming you…
If you have a disabled child who’s receiving any federal or Massachusetts state government benefits, chances are, if you or anyone else leaves them an inheritance, they will become disqualified for those benefits. Any needs-based benefits such as Supplemental Security Income (SSI), MassHealth, or subsidized housing which imposes an income or asset limit on the…
GUEST BLOGGER: VICTOR MEDINA – Victor is managing partner at Medina, Martinez & Castroll, LLC in Pennington, NJ. His focus is on estate planning and he authors an excellent blog at New Jersey Estate Planning. He has given me permission to repost one of his blog entries and one that is relevant in any state….
This is a first in a series of posts I will be writing about why fill-in-the-blank legal forms suck. I will be focusing first on over the counter Last Will and Testaments that you can get at any office supply store. I went to one of the big office supply stores and bought a Last…
I recently had the honor of contributing to a book about estate planning geared towards the everyday reader – The Complete Guide to Organizing Your Records for Estate Planning by John N. Peragine, Jr. I’ve put a link up to the book on the right column of this blog for a few weeks now but…