Category Archives: Estate Planning
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 »
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 »
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 »
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 »
What Is Pre-Mortem Probate?
Of the things that people worry about missing out on after they die, probate is not usually one of them. You might wish that you could listen in on your own funeral and hear people express the appreciation for you that they were never able to put into words when you were alive. You… Read More »
