Tag: Estate planning

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • How to Hire a Caregiver

    If you are hiring a caregiver for yourself or another loved one, you may be tempted to try to make the process as simple as possible by treating the caregiver as a “private contractor.” You tell the person, “I will pay you so much an hour, and you deal with the IRS and the State…