Planning for Life and Death
Did you know that the form of ownership on your house can affect whether or not your loved one gets to keep it on your death? Even if you leave your house to someone in your will, they might not get to keep it. This is true not only because of the general differences in kinds …
While there is room to disagree about many elements of this year’s proposed tax reforms, one thing all parents and retirees can be thankful for is this: the tax-deferred savings you’ve collected all your life can still be saved for your children. Understanding the rules can give you and your kids extra decades of preferential …
Open source licenses, as a practical matter, are treated as fire-and-forget by most developers. But what happens when the contributor dies? As a contributor, you usually have a copyright in the code that you created. That copyright came into existence automatically, and if you don’t do anything with it legally then the copyright will pass to …
Marrying for financial reasons was already ancient when Jane Austen wrote Pride and Prejudice, where Ms. Eliza Bennet first realized she loved Mr. Darcy when she laid eyes on his “beautiful grounds at Pemberly.” Marriage for money was still everywhere when George Bernard Shaw commented on it less flatteringly a century ago in Mrs. Warren’s …
When a child graduates high school and heads for college, a great chapter of life is over and a new one is beginning. Both parent and child work to adapt to a new reality. Even exceptional children may suddenly need to develop new skill-sets: making a new peer group for the first time in years, …
Fundamentally, good estate planning is spending a small part of your estate (typically less than 1%) to significantly reduce the harm that will occur if certain bad things (with risks much higher than 1%) occur. One great tool for this is the trust. There are lots of estate planning reasons for trusts. They can be …
Business owners frequently make mistakes in classification of their employees. This is understandable because business owners have a great deal to do in keeping their business effective and profitable for their customers, their shareholders, and their employees. But it also creates substantial legal risk. In recent years, large groups of employees have even brought class …
The Right Idea A startup doesn’t start with an idea. Ideas are wonderful. If you live life thoughfully, you’ll probably have at least a half-dozen ideas that change the business habits of people you never even worked with. Maybe you mention a new product idea to an artist at a craft show, maybe you discuss …
Case: In re Estate of Barnes, No. 91488-5 (Jan 28, 2016). When Mrs. Barnes passed away, it did not take long for her caretaker and her family to start fighting. Even a fully competent person who leaves property to their caretaker runs the risk that a court will conclude they were under “undue influence.” (See …
As I discussed in one of my earlier posts, there are times when discount wills are more appropriate than lawyers for making a will. For example, if we are very young and in a non-dangerous profession, don’t have significant assets, and nothing else is going on, we may prefer a discount will or simply to …