The law provides people with many ways to protect their property, and ensure that their will is properly executed after their death. When you own something, you have a vast level of control over your property. You can change it, damage it, tear it down, repurpose it, or safeguard it. However, when you’re dead, all
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Millennials – death is not something anyone wishes to think about. Instead, it is usually through certain circumstances that the consequences of our own mortality are thrust upon us, and we realize that we perhaps do not have as much time on this earth as we would have hoped for. Life ends, one way or
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The law sees pets as property. For now. However, even in the eyes of the law, pets are more than just an extension of your material wealth. Animal law tries to fight for the welfare of animals, criminalizing cruelty, neglect and torturous treatment of animals. But that doesn’t change that, fundamentally, the law still sees
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A death in the family is a tragedy, and there’s no way to truly prepare for it. No matter how inevitable it might have been, death is an element of living we all have trouble with – and getting through such troubling times can take an enormous amount of strength and unity in the family.
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Celebrities often have the largest estates and the most reason for considering proper estate planning. Yet beyond simply protecting your assets and valuables and ensuring that they go into the right hands, artists also carry the need for proper legacy planning. Legacy planning is separate from estate planning – it’s about utilizing the legal tools
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With the advent of the Internet, there is almost no limit to the idea of “do-it-yourself” (DIY). Theoretically, you could do anything yourself with a little bit of research and a few resources – even when it comes to legal matters. A will, for example, is technically only a single document with your signature and
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Estate planning is the art of ensuring that your wealth remains as untouched as possible, without cheating the government out of any necessary taxes. A legally sound and competent estate plan can be the make-or-break difference between paying millions of dollars in taxes, or leaving your inheritors with an estate that is mostly intact. Among some of
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The estate tax is basically an inheritance tax that people with a total value of over $5.49 million (in 2017) pay when they die. Anyone below that value is tax exempt upon death. This means it only affects a few thousand Americans every year – about 1 in 500 deaths. This makes it a divisive
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We do not typically have much control over what happens after we die – we can respectfully ask those we love to take care of each other and do with our bodies as we wish, but there is not much of a way to maintain any real grasp over what really happens when everything is
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Do you have a grasp of how to go about giving your assets away to your loved ones? Titles, beneficiaries, joint accounts, trusts and wills – this is the world of estate planning, a world where ensuring that your wealth gets to where it needs to go is turned into an art form. While asking
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