Author Archives: Jay Butchko
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 »
You Don’t Have to Be Elderly or Infirm to Benefit From a Power of Attorney
When an elderly person is suffering from ill health, there are usually a lot of whispers among the person’s relatives about power of attorney (POA) documents. If the person is too ill to make financial decisions or transactions and does not already have a POA signed, then it is too late, and family drama… Read More »
New York Is Officially the Most Expensive State to Retire
Some retirees immediately fly south for retirement and never look back, but a substantial number of New Yorkers feel that no place besides New York can ever be home. Despite this, they would be happy to never again have to navigate the slippery steps of a brownstone after a snowstorm. Especially when your job… Read More »
Skilled Nursing Facilities and Your New York Estate Plan
When is a nursing home not a nursing home? You never have to think about this unless you face a major health crisis or unless you are a caregiver for an elderly relative or for a family member with a severe chronic illness. Clients often approach their initial consultations with estate planning lawyers with… Read More »
Simplify Your Estate Plan by Listing Successor Beneficiaries
Every time you invest a few hours in drafting an estate planning document, you are saving your family many hours of work and large sums of money in the future, and you may even be preventing years of family enmity. Of course, when you experience a major change in your family situation, it is… Read More »
A Sobering Look at Retirement Expenses in New York
New Yorkers do not suffer fools gladly, and stating the obvious is one of the marks of a fool. Therefore, if you go to New York and start complaining about how expensive everything is, you are unlikely to endear yourself to the locals. On the other hand, complaining about how expensive everything is in… Read More »