Estate Planning Blog Articles

Your real estate holdings, life insurance, bank accounts and retirement savings won’t magically flow into your trust.

Trusts are an essential part of most estate plans, even the plans of people with moderate wealth. You need to know the basics of trusts, especially the key terms and concepts of the most widely-used types of trusts.

It is surprisingly easy and common to make mistakes when designating beneficiaries on retirement and investment accounts.

Remember that a will goes through probate, so a husband and wife typically try to avoid it by using joint ownership or beneficiary designations. However, they’re often mistaken by believing the will still controls their estate.

Trusts can be useful in estate planning for passing on assets to your heirs. A grantor retained income trust (GRIT) is a specific type of trust that allows you to transfer assets, while still benefiting from the income they generate.

Estate planning is an incredibly important tool, not just for the uber wealthy or those thinking about retirement. On the contrary, estate planning is something every adult should do.

The death of your spouse is a period of unimaginable grief. Unfortunately, there are many legal and financial obligations that will not wait.

If you are the parent of a person with special needs, you are well aware that the role you play is very different than it may be for other children. Properly planning to meet their financial needs, both in the immediate and long term, is a critical part of supporting your child. This support must often continue well past the typical age of adulthood, which means parents need to put in place financial tools to care for their children, in the event of the parents’ death.

Estate planning generally focuses primarily on lifetime protection and post-death distribution of assets. Special needs planning focuses primarily on the individual beneficiary’s lifestyle and care needs.