» Estate Planning

I always impress upon estate planning clients the importance of updating their homeowners’ insurance after conveying real estate to a trust, even if the transfer is via a “ladybird deed” that doesn’t take effect until the client is deceased.�…

There’s a National Holiday for It Raise your hand if you have your party hat on for National Estate Planning Awareness Week, which kicked off yesterday! Just me? Not surprising. Yes, National Estate Planning Awareness Week is an actual thing. Adopt…

While we rarely see joint wills, they do come up often enough in conversations with clients to warrant a brief mention here. The context is usually the mistaken belief that a joint will might simplify the overall estate plan or, perhaps, result in a…

In Michigan, any document that says who gets what after one’s death and that meets specific requirements constitutes a valid will.  There are exceptions to this general rule, however, allowing certain less formal documents to also qualify as wills…

Your Mom Can’t Manage Money People often come into my office and promptly inform me that while they need a will and power of attorney, they do not need a trust. I always ask them to give me some time to go through their situation and explain ho…

I was recently asked by clients to review a trust that had been drafted by another attorney several years ago. The trust, like many others we see and draft here at Wright Beamer, left a gift to a Michigan-based nonprofit organization that had been es…

Chances are, you may have dozens (if not hundreds) of online accounts. Some accounts may be logins simply for ordering purposes, but others may have important and significant value. What happens to all this when you die? The answer completely depen…

Regular readers of these postings know that estate planning is a big part of what we do here at Wright Beamer. An often-asked question is: “Why do I need an estate plan?” Avoiding unintended consequences of dying without one is just one of the ma…