Recent Blog Posts
What Happens to Your Estate Plan When You Divorce?
If you look for it, you can find aspirational content about people who claim that divorce gave them a new lease on life. Most of it is selling you false hope. While you might feel relieved about getting out of an unhappy marriage, you might be among the large group of recently divorced people… Read More »
Important Probate Deadlines
Your most impressive feats of adulting do not take place until the people who always thought that you were useless were gone. By the time you transported your children to multiple extracurricular activities while also keeping up with all your responsibilities at work, your parents were no longer healthy enough to notice. Your children… Read More »
Who Needs Probate Lawyers?
In every probate case, the court appoints someone as personal representative of the estate. If the decedent wrote a will, the court appoints the person that the testator listed as personal representative. If there is no will, then the court usually appoints the person who petitioned the court to open the estate for probate…. Read More »
Is Insurance Your Ticket Out of Creditor Claims During Probate?
Once you get past the estate planning conversations about sunset walks on the beach and spoiling your grandchildren at the holidays, the subject often turns to expenses that a deceased person’s estate can incur, the things that will diminish the value of your property between your death and when your heirs receive their inheritance…. Read More »
Meet the Exhausted Matriarchs of the 99 Percent
To say that a mother’s work is never done is to state the obvious. Your children still need you long after the days when you spoon feed them applesauce, install training wheels on their bikes, or drive them to school early on a Saturday morning to sit for a college entrance exam. The most… Read More »
Early Withdrawals From Retirement Accounts
Some people fret about the account balances of their retirement accounts getting too big. They study spreadsheets, plugging in values for when their required minimum distributions (RMDs) will start and trying to figure out how much they will owe in taxes on the money that the law requires them to take out of their… Read More »
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 »
The Retirement Decluttering Labyrinth
Whether anyone has done it in real life, or whether it is just a social media myth, Swedish death cleaning holds a certain mystique. The clickbait around Swedish death cleaning would have us believe that, by tidying your house and removing clutter, you can make peace with death. The narrative goes that, in Sweden,… Read More »
Maryland Disinterment Laws
For as long as you have known how to read, and as long as you have known that death exists, you have probably been aware that gravestones say “rest in peace” or some variation thereof. You take it for granted, maybe even remix the phrase for rhetorical effect, as the folks at the debt… Read More »
Sustainably Sourcing Your Retirement Income
Even before YouTube saturated our minds with images of children doing ordinary, cute kid things, television broadcasts etched themselves in our memories of the marshmallow experiment. Researchers would leave a child in a room with a marshmallow for one minute. The researcher would tell the child that, if the child had not eaten the… Read More »
