Category Archives: Estate Planning
Power of Attorney and Your Estate Plan
Your will is not the only estate planning document you need; in fact, it is the one that you can most easily do without. If someone dies without a will, the court will still distribute the decedent’s property to his or her closest surviving family members according to New York’s laws of intestate succession. … Read More »
The Medical Care Aspects of Your Estate Plan
Estate planning is not just about money. With you, your property is only stuff. Yes, it would be stressful for your family if you never indicated your wishes about who would inherit which assets from you, and your surviving relatives had to guess, and sometimes argue, about what you would have wanted or who… Read More »
Can Listing Beneficiaries on Non-Probate Assets Backfire?
Conventional wisdom holds that the first step in estate planning is to write a will. This way, when your estate goes to probate after you die, the court will distribute your property to your heirs in accordance with your wishes. The next step is to keep as much of your property as possible out… Read More »
Estate Planning Guide for Seniors
As we age, the future becomes increasingly uncertain, making it more challenging to predict and plan. This can be particularly stressful for seniors and their families. A proactive approach to manage these uncertainties involves getting financial and healthcare matters in order ahead of time. Estate planning plays a vital role in this process, providing… Read More »
A Financial First Aid Kit Can Save Your Family Time and Money
Whoever creates clickbait related to estate planning must not know the golden rule of estate planning, namely that estate planning is about planning for life, not planning for death. Content creators can’t seem to resist mentioning the “D” word at every opportunity. For example, Swedish death cleaning is a great idea, but it is… Read More »
Your Plan to Work Until You Are 70 May Backfire
Ensuring financial stability during retirement is becoming more difficult for each successive cohort of retirees. Our income has less purchasing power than our parents’ income did, and employer-provided retirement pensions are getting harder to find. Today’s workers are lucky if their employers contribute to a retirement count for them at all. Even having your… Read More »
Do Boomer Enrichment Centers Count as Aging in Place?
When you are rushing to catch the subway to work and reflecting on how much older you are than when you first started this routine, it is easy to think that there are no satisfactory options for retirement. Conventional wisdom has it that New York retirement can go one of two ways. Either you… Read More »
How to Build Your Estate Plan When Your Health, Not Your Finances, Determines When You Retire
With everything that has happened since you have been in the workforce, it is understandable how you have managed to make it to your 50s without thinking about retirement or estate planning in much detail. The gray hairs began to appear, followed by friendly brochures from the AARP, but you did not give them… Read More »
Revocable Trusts Are Not a Tax Haven
Setting up an irrevocable trust is intimidating for almost everyone except for people who have grown up around them. The word “irrevocable” is scary, even for people who do not think of themselves as commitment phobic. Watching a trust manage your money while you are unable to change your mind about it feels too… Read More »
The “I Would Prefer Not To” Estate Plan
When journalists talk about the Great Resignation, they usually use the term “quiet quitting” in the same article. When young people join the Great Resignation, they are defiantly walking away from the materialistic ambitions that, they have realized, are getting them nowhere. Giving up is only one aspect of resignation, though; resignation is also… Read More »