5 Reasons to Protect Your Retirement Accounts Now

Your retirement account provides asset protection during your lifetime, but as soon as you pass that account to a loved one, that protection evaporates. When your spouse, child, or other loved one inherits your retirement account, creditors have the power to seize it and use the funds to satisfy their claims. This means one lawsuit […]

Don’t Let Creditors Inherit from You or Your Spouse

Although spouses receive special treatment when inheriting a retirement account such as an IRA (the ability to roll over the account into a personal retirement account and to stretch the distributions over their lifetime), the retirement account you leave for your spouse can still be seized in a divorce, a lawsuit, or a bankruptcy proceeding. […]

Creating a Treasure Map: The Benefits of Preparing an Inventory before Death

If you have already done your estate planning, you have taken a significant step toward ensuring that your loved ones will know how to manage your affairs if you become incapacitated or die. However, simply having a will or a trust and related estate planning documents is often not enough. A detailed inventory of all […]

Is Your Plan Incapacity Proof?

For most people, it is perfectly natural to think about estate planning only in terms of planning for death. While planning for your death is very important, if that is all you plan for, your planning can quickly become woefully inadequate. As medical knowledge and technology have improved over the decades, so too has modern […]

Wills vs. Trusts: In Plain English

Everyone has heard of wills and trusts. Most articles written on these topics, however, often presume that everyone knows the basics of these important documents. But, in reality, many of us do not – and with good reason – as they are rooted in complicated, centuries-old law. If you are not an estate planning attorney, […]