Category Archives: Probate
Delaying Probate Can Be an Act of Self-Care
Procrastinating your own estate plan only makes sense; only the most organized and the most worry-prone people get started on their estate plans before they turn 60, unless something scary happens in their lives that makes them acutely aware of their own mortality. There is little incentive to make plans for what will happen… Read More »
Situations Where You Should Hire a Lawyer During Probate
In most actions that involve the civil courts, a substantial number of litigants represent themselves, or at least take the preliminary steps in the case before realizing that they need to hire a lawyer. In family courts, people file fall divorce, attend mediation, and draft marital settlement agreements without professional legal representation. In the… Read More »
Calculating Personal Representative Compensation Is Not as Simple as It Sounds
Most of the work you do to help your family is unpaid. There are certain corners of the Internet that calculate, down to the last penny, how much it would cost to pay someone for all the things you have done for your children, from keeping infants fed, cuddled, and safe to transporting older… Read More »
Calculating Personal Representative Compensation Is Not as Simple as It Sounds
Most of the work you do to help your family is unpaid. There are certain corners of the Internet that calculate, down to the last penny, how much it would cost to pay someone for all the things you have done for your children, from keeping infants fed, cuddled, and safe to transporting older… Read More »
How to Contest a Deceased Family Member’s Will
The most common reason that the surviving family members of a recently deceased person dread probate is that it involves the payment of debts and taxes. Probate is a grim reminder that not even death can spare you from some financial obligations. Whoever said that the only things that are certain in life are… Read More »
Can You Procrastinate Your Way Out of Probate?
Estate planning is a long list of tasks that everyone puts off. If you have the patience for such a slow-paced drama, then it can be interesting to speculate about which of the tasks the testator will get around to completing before he or she goes the way of all flesh. Unfortunately, death does… Read More »
How to Stop Your Job as Personal Representative of an Estate From Driving You Crazy
For some people, family life is a constant source of stress. For others, family interactions are usually so painless that you wonder why everyone else is in such a foul mood during the holidays, since you enjoy spending the holidays with your relatives, and even with your spouse’s relatives. Some events involve such a… Read More »
A Letter of Wishes Can Say What Legal Boilerplate Cannot
The hardest part of losing a family member is the unanswered questions. If the deceased family member is older than you, then you probably spent most of your life expecting him or her to predecease you, and as your family member grew older and sicker, you made peace with how life would be when… Read More »
An Estate Plan That Does Not Include Your Children as Beneficiaries of Your Will
When you think about parents disinheriting your children, you probably imagine an exhausted grandmother opening her laptop after Christmas dinner and revising her will because her son and daughter-in-law made one rude comment too many, and the testator decided that she had endured enough years of disrespect and ingratitude from this side of the… Read More »
3 Kinds of Testators the Probate Court Cannot Stand
If you are an incorrigible people pleaser, then death at least relieves you of the dread of seeing other people’s reactions to your mistakes and shortcomings. Despite this, even people who ostensibly do not care at all about what other people think about them sometimes put great effort into their estate plans. They do… Read More »