Estate Planning

If you are in the hospital, the last thing you want is for a family member or a trusted friend to be denied information about your condition or prognosis.

For a variety of reasons, people sometimes want some or all of their assets to pass directly to specific individuals upon their deaths, outside of probate. POD and TOD accounts are one way to accomplish this.

You aren't technically required to hire a lawyer to draft a will, but failing to do so could lead to costly problems for your family and other heirs.

A power of attorney may seem like a simple document, but there are several important decisions that need to be made when creating one.

A power of attorney allows a person you appoint - your attorney-in-fact or agent - to act in your place for financial or medical purposes if you ever become incapacitated or can't act on your own behalf.

Elderlaw 101

A trustee is the person or institution appointed to manage a trust on behalf of beneficiaries of the trust.

Elderlaw 101

While you likely have the best of intentions regarding how you want your estate distributed when you die or your affairs handled should you become incapacitated, without proper planning your best intentions may not be enough.

An executor, also called a personal representative, is the person responsible for managing the administration of a deceased person's estate.

If your family contains opposite-gender parents in the first marriage for each and one or more kids, all healthy and thriving, your estate plan will probably be pretty straightforward. But if not, it's not as simple and you have a lot of...