Estate Administration & Probate

We now live in a world where many of our most prized possessions are housed on computers, websites and cloud-based storage. Additionally, we now access many of our valuable financial accounts online, often opting to receive paperless statements and communications. But...

The youngest members of the baby boomer generation are entering their 50s this year, which means a large percentage of the population in Massachusetts and the rest of the United States is nearing or has reached retirement age. Although people are living longer,...

Massachusetts residents may be interested in an article discussing some of the basics of estate planning and why a person would need to implement such a plan. Relatives of a person who dies without an estate plan in place could be at a disadvantage. The purpose of...

Striking the right balance between emotion and logic is often a tricky challenge when making decisions. We often conceptualize this very-human challenge as heart versus head. It's a challenge that often comes up in estate-planning contexts regarding what to do with a...

An untimely death can raise estate issues in very pointed ways. When death comes suddenly, to someone who is still in the prime of life, the emotional elements of the sudden loss tend to make resolving the issues even more challenging. In this post, we will discuss...

It's been quite awhile since we devoted a post to business succession planning. As we noted in our April 2 post, families that own and operate small businesses can find themselves in conflict when it is time to transfer ownership interests in the business. As we noted...

Wealth is a relative term. For much of human history, most people have lived and died without large nest eggs to pass along to surviving spouses, their children or other heirs. Indeed, for millions and millions of people, life itself has been a matter of daily...

In the first part of this post, we explained why federal regulators have issued rules to help surviving spouses and other heirs who wish to assume a mortgage after the mortgage holder dies. As we discussed last week, mortgage servicers have often failed to make a good...

When a husband or wife dies, the surviving spouse is not only faced with a difficult emotional loss. There are also typically various estate administration issues to be taken care of. For some surviving spouses, those issues can include the right to remain in the...

In the age of the Internet, estate planning increasingly includes decisions about digital data that would have been inconceivable a generation ago. To be sure, traditional questions about who should receive which property remain as important as ever. Someone...