Estate Planning

As you make your estate plan, you may consider splitting everything up equally between your beneficiaries. Maybe you have four adult children, so you’re going to leave them all 25% ownership of the family home or the vacation cabin. Maybe you have $1 million in your...

While there are numerous steps to estate planning, drafting a will is usually the first. A will allows the testator to name beneficiaries. These are individuals or organizations that assets will be given to upon the testator’s death.  A will can also carry out several...

California is a state that allows terminally ill patients to determine when and where they will make their final exit from the world. First signed into law in 2016, the California End of Life Option Act was later amended in 2022 to shorten the total period of the...

Writing an estate plan is important for your future and for your family. Far too many people haven’t written a plan at all. They’ve left no instructions for the distribution of their assets or what end-of-life care they would like to receive. However, even among those...

Your life insurance policy is set to make a substantial payment to your adult children when you pass away. You purchased the policy when your first child was born, knowing it was an easy way to provide for them in the future. This may be the most valuable asset that...

Most people understand that they will need an estate plan at some point in their lives. They’re going to pass away and they need to – at the very least – leave behind a will to tell their descendants what to do with their financial assets. Many are also aware that...

You can make your medical preferences known for a time when you cannot express them yourself and possibly at the end of your life in an advance health care directive. Sometimes, these are referred to as living wills. In your advance directive, you can address various...

You would like to disinherit someone from your will. Perhaps you are unhappy with the choices one of your adult children has made, or maybe you simply know that they don’t need the financial support and that the money would be better used elsewhere. You want to take...

Sometimes, a testator will purposefully exclude one or more of their heirs from their estate – but what happens if they do so accidentally? Errors of omission in wills may be more common than most people realize, but the law doesn’t want to see anybody disinherited...

The estate planning process largely revolves around who your assets will go to upon your death. Nonetheless, there is so much more to estate planning.  You can utilize estate planning documents, such as a medical Power of Attorney, to ensure that appropriate decisions...