How to Protect Your Pets with Pet Trusts For many pet owners, pets are their “furry babies” and special consideration needs to be given to properly plan for these much-loved members of the family. Making sure that pets have a loving home in the event that the owner is no longer able to care [...]
Wills vs. Living Trusts: What’s the Difference? Do You Need Both? Wills and living trusts are two very different types of estate planning tools that can serve both similar and different purposes. If you are putting together an estate plan, which one should you use? Should you use both? Here is a brief introduction [...]
How To Support Your Favorite Charities With A Donor-Advised Fund The holidays are a time of charitable giving. The joy and warmth that surrounds the weeks leading up to the new year leaves many of us in a more generous spirit. In fact, most charities receive the bulk of their annual donations during the [...]
Massachusetts Estate Planning Statistics As the old adage goes, “If you fail to plan, you plan to fail.” Planning your life and day to day activities is important, but planning needs to extend beyond your life. Putting an estate plan in place ensures that your estate is distributed without conflict, headache, or burdening tax [...]
How Do You Protect Digital Assets & Social Media Accounts After Death? From how we access our money to where we store our photographs, many aspects of life that used to involve in-person interactions and tangible property now exist online. As a result, the concept of “digital assets” has become mainstream, and these digital [...]
Who Is an Executor (Personal Representative) of a Will and What Are their Duties ? Serving as the executor (known in Massachusetts as a Personal Representative) of a loved one’s estate is an important task that carries a number of responsibilities. As a result, while almost anyone can serve as an executor (with the [...]
Divorce Considerations for Massachusetts Estate Plans Going through a divorce is an important time to revisit your estate plan. Whether you prepared your estate plan before or during your marriage, there are a number of provisions that potentially need to be changed, and not updating your plan could result in undesirable consequences during your [...]
What Happens if You Die Without an Estate Plan in Massachusetts? When is the right time to prepare an estate plan? Do you really need one at all? If you are like most people, these kinds of questions are the reasons why you do not currently have an estate plan in place. While there [...]
The Complete Guide To The Massachusetts Probate Process When an individual passes away, they leave behind property (houses, cars, bank accounts, retirement accounts, etc.) that will need to be distributed to family, friends, and creditors. Fortunately, property distribution isn’t a chaotic and unorganized affair. In fact, there is a legal process for administering property [...]
How to Incorporate Young Children into Your Massachusetts Estate Plan While it is important for people of all ages and with all types of family circumstances to have an estate plan, for parents, estate planning takes on heightened importance. We recently discussed some special considerations for parents whose children are entering adulthood. In this [...]
