Tag: Estate planning
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Estate Plans Explained
How Can I Be Sure My Family Won’t Fight After I’m Gone? Unfortunately, there is nothing you can do to guarantee that there will be no fighting among your loved ones after you are gone. There are plenty of difficult emotions to deal with after the passing of a loved one, and conflict can easily…
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The Third Guarantee: Change
An often-heard quote about lifetime guarantees is the one about death and taxes. I would suggest that there is a third guarantee — that life changes. Nothing stays the same. So, once you’ve completed your estate plan, you’ll want to review it every so often to address life’s changes. What could a review with your estate planner…
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Who’s on First?
The humor behind the classic comedy routine, Who’s on first?, comes from the fact that the speakers are using identical terms to mean different things. Yet they both pretend not to recognize the problem. The language of estate planning can raise problems for the uninitiated, and the problems may not be funny at all. The…
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Legal: Make It Personal
In planning our estate, we often spend much of our energy on deciding how to distribute the home and the cash, and we often overlook the personal items. In my practice, I see families distributing large sums of money and real estate rather smoothly. Then, when it comes to personal property, family conflict arises. From…
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New and Powerful Estate Planning Tool: the Hawai‘i Asset Protection Trust (APT)
Two years ago, Hawai‘i joined Delaware, Nevada and 11 other states in validating self-settled spendthrift trusts. What this means is that you can now create a trust for yourself that will protect your assets from your own creditors. This is a huge departure from prior law, which expressly prohibited such trusts. For convenience, we will…