Guardianship for Minor Children: What Happens If You Never Name One
When both parents of two young children died in the same accident, the family didn’t fight over the estate. They fought over the children, in a courtroom, before a judge who’d never met either family.
Generation-Skipping Trusts: Passing Wealth to Grandchildren Without Double Taxation
A grandmother wanted to leave money directly to her grandchildren, skipping her financially comfortable children. Her instinct ran straight into a tax law written specifically to discourage exactly that move.
Family Limited Partnerships: A Business Owner’s Tool for Passing Down the Company
A manufacturing founder wanted to transfer business ownership to his children over time without giving up control while he still ran daily operations. He needed to separate economic value from the steering wheel.
Estate Planning for Blended Families: Whose Kids Get What
A man raised his wife’s daughter for eighteen years and assumed she’d inherit alongside his biological children. When he died without a will, the law asked a narrower question: who is a legal child.
Dynasty Trusts, Explained: When Multi-Generational Trust Planning Makes Sense (and When It’s Overkill)
For centuries, English common law capped how long a trust could tie up property. Starting with South Dakota in 1983, American states began quietly repealing that rule inside their own borders.
Digital Estate Planning: Who Gets Your Passwords and Accounts When You’re Gone
When a woman died unexpectedly, her sister spent months trying to access her email — not for sentiment, but because years of tax records and mortgage logins lived nowhere else.
Contesting a Will: Grounds, Odds, and What It Actually Costs
A daughter watched her father’s will, signed six weeks before his death while heavily medicated, leave nearly everything to a caregiver he’d known less than a year. Courts don’t care whether a will is fair.
Charitable Remainder Trusts: Give to Charity, Keep an Income Stream
Ruth wanted to sell an appreciated rental property, keep an income stream, and leave money to charity — and assumed those three wants were in conflict. She was wrong about the conflict.
Business Succession Planning: Keeping a Family Business in the Family
Only about 30% of family-owned businesses survive into the second generation, roughly 12% into the third. Most aren’t failing because the product stopped working — they’re failing because no one wrote the plan down.
Beneficiary RMD Rules: What You Owe on an Inherited Retirement Account
A woman inherited her father’s IRA in 2021, heard she had “ten years,” and did nothing for four years. She wasn’t wrong about the window. She was wrong about what it required of her.