Proposition 19 Restricts Parent-Child Transfer of Low Property Tax Rates
As I’m sure all of you are all too aware, we just had a significant election on many levels. I’ll leave national commentary for others. For homeowners in California, though, Proposition 19 is making big changes…
Is it OK to leave your children unequal shares of your assets? Here’s how the issue was framed in the Ethicist column on the New York Times Magazine:
This is the situation: An elderly parent has a fair amount of money and two children. One is wealthy with luxury properties, a spouse…
Greetings all. If you are stuck at home and without basic legal documents, read on. In the spirit of offering what I can to help people gain some piece of mind amidst the panic and uncertainty of the pandemic, here are some resources that you can use to get the basics in order, for now.
As I…
Inheriting money is not something most of us do more than once or twice in a lifetime, if ever. For the vast majority of us, this money comes to us free of estate tax, because current law only taxes estates worth more than $10 million, indexed each year for inflation.
But money that you…
When Aretha Franklin died in August of 2018, her family thought that she had died without a will, or as lawyers would say it, intestate. When a person dies without a will, the state has a built-in set of rules, called intestacy laws, that determine who will inherit that person’s estate.…
California’s recent fires in Butte County certainly got me thinking about my family’s important documents and how best to store them safely. It is so hard to imagine losing everything and having to rebuild from the ground up. Storing our most important documents in a firesafe box…
My new book, Every Californian’s Guide to Estate Planning is available now and I’m excited to share it with all of you.
I wrote it because there isn’t a California-specific estate planning book out there, and we, as Californians, have some special things to deal with.
In…
What is estate planning, really? I know that most lawyers focus on reducing taxes, or the creation of documents, but when you get down to it, what you’re really doing when you make an estate plan is giving everything away, right?
So, to me, understanding the practice of generosity and what…
