Author Archives: Jay Butchko
Keep Your House Out of Probate With a Life Estate Deed
When young people get married, they do it with big dreams about their careers that are just starting and about the children that will be born to them in the future. Even the most pragmatic people often face disappointments later in life about how achieving those dreams is harder than it looks. By contrast,… Read More »
Return That Security Deposit
One of the hardest parts of operating any small business, including being a residential landlord, is chasing people around for individual payments. For landlords, maintenance of your rental units is also a major source of stress. After a tenant moves out, you want to get the apartment looking move-in ready as quickly as possible,… Read More »
How to Inherit a 401(k) Account
Inheriting property is not as glamorous as it sounds. It is often as much work to gain possession of the property as it would be to earn an equal amount of money through employment. If you inherit a real estate property, you must pay property taxes on it, and you are responsible for all… Read More »
How Can Landlords Accommodate Cost-Burdened Student Loan Borrowers
In your worst moments, it is easy to feel like D.C. is turning into a ghost town. The nation’s capital was never famous for its nightlife, except perhaps in certain parts of Adams Morgan where no one above the age of 40 dared to tread. The best restaurants closed at dinner time, and some… Read More »
Common Types of Real Estate Disputes
Despite what all the aspirational content about entrepreneurship will tell you, there is no industry where your entrepreneurship amounts to passive income. Buying real estate properties and renting them out sounds like easy money until you do it. The everyday costs of maintaining the properties, or of outsourcing the work of maintaining them, are… Read More »
Paying Debts During Probate
Keeping up with payments on your own debts is hard enough. How do you assume responsibility for someone else’s debts, especially when that person is no longer around to fill in missing details about his or her financial situation? This is what the personal representative of the estate must do in every probate case…. Read More »
Penalty-Free 401(k) Withdrawals to Pay for Long-Term Care Insurance Premiums
If you have money saved for retirement, especially if at least some of that money is in an employer-provided 401(k) account, then you are in a better position than most people are. You have already avoided the worst-case scenario, where your only retirement income comes from your Social Security checks, which are not enough… Read More »
Can You Negotiate Your Way to an Affordable Home Purchase?
After years of unaffordable everything, we are starting to see a few rays of sunshine for buyers in the housing market. Yes, the prices of groceries are still astronomical, and wages are stagnant, as the few people who still have jobs are afraid to ask for raises or apply to new positions. Many consumer… Read More »
Appealing Your Property Taxes
It is not just your imagination that all your bills have gotten more expensive in the past few years. As lonely as you might have been when you were working remotely during the pandemic, it was the last time you saw your debt balances get lower and your savings account balances grow bigger. For… Read More »
Don’t Be an Impoverished Noble: Set Up a Revocable Trust
One of the concepts underlying the practice of estate planning is that people’s fortunes rise and fall. Just because you are financially secure now, this does not mean that you should assume that your wealth will stick around to sustain you in your old age and that there will be anything left for your… Read More »
