Recent Blog Posts
The Top 7 Mistakes People Make in Estate Planning and How to Avoid Them
Your estate plan does not have to be perfect. There is probably no such thing as a perfect estate plan. Glaring errors in estate planning can make life more difficult for your heirs, though. Most estate planning mistakes simply cause delays or preventable expenses during probate, but the worst ones can cause long-lasting family… Read More »
Pet Trusts in New York: How to Legally Protect Your Furry Friends
There once was a Maltese dog named Trouble. He belonged to a wealthy heiress. When she died, she left behind a trust with millions of dollars for Trouble’s care. This sparked a major legal dispute. The problem was not that the testator had established a trust for Trouble’s care; you can set up a… Read More »
Estate Planning Before Buying a Home in New York: What You Should Know
It’s strange how our favorite trends age as we do. Rock music was once considered the exclusive province of young people, and now familiarity with the music of bands like the Beatles and The Who immediately brands you as old. Even the things we considered a universal hallmark of youth, such as dating, have… Read More »
Wills vs. Trusts: Which Is Right for You in New York?
People who are old enough to have gotten started on their estate plans are outspoken about how little they understand generative artificial intelligence, but even we old folks understand that Chat GPT and its imitators do not think; rather, they only remix what humans said in the human-written web content that chatbots use as… Read More »
How to Avoid Probate in New York (and Why You Should)
Despite what you see in the movies, inheriting money does not feel like winning the lottery, at least not the kind of winning the lottery where you just hand your scratch off ticket to the gas station cashier and walk away with the money. The hurdles you must clear to get your inherited money… Read More »
How to Choose the Right Estate Planning Lawyer in New York City
It is possible to build your estate plan from beginning to end without hiring a lawyer, provided that your estate plan is simple. People have the right to represent themselves in many legal matters, including probate, so the personal representative of your estate might be able to settle your estate without a lawyer. Some… Read More »
Is Whole Life Insurance Right for You?
Some New Yorkers are loaded and can afford to live as lavishly in retirement as they did when they were working. With or without selling their luxury condo in Manhattan, they can afford to move into one of those fancy “Boomer enrichment centers” where the staff distract them from the realities of their advancing… Read More »
The Many Roles of the Personal Representative of a Deceased Person’s Estate
Being the personal representative of a deceased person’s estate is like being the default parent of a child, except that it takes place at the other end of a person’s life journey. Both roles are an honor, and secretly you would not want to share them with anyone, but they are both exhausting. When… Read More »
Should You Front Load Your Retirement With Fun?
When you consider it carefully, “What do you want to do when you retire?” is more than one question. Most people will answer with ideas for travel and adventures, or else long-awaited bucket list items they have long looked forward to accomplishing, such as cooking a Thanksgiving dinner from scratch for the whole family…. Read More »
Just Say No to Your Inheritance?
In a documentary film about the band Pink Floyd, Roger Waters, one of the band’s founding members, described what a disorienting experience it was to acquire wealth suddenly. Disorienting experiences and Pink Floyd are not always a bad combination, as anyone who has ever smoked weed before attending a Pink Floyd planetarium show can… Read More »