Fighting For Your Inheritance
Fighting For Your Inheritance
Most of us are not capable of giving billions to charity, like Warren Buffet and Bill Gates But charities, to be successful, don’t need billions (they’d love to have billions, I’m sure, but most operate on far less than that).
Most people make modest charitable gifts to their favorite charity, university or church during their lifetime. …
California Wills and Trusts are not created equal. In this video, we describe the basic differences between the mental capacity required for California Will creation and the mental capacity required for California Trust creation. For those viewing this blog by email subscription, you can click on the title for a link to the video.
Love and marriage may go together (like a horse and carriage…), but marriage and estate planning may be another story.
If a person creates a Will or a Trust in California and then subsequently marries, that person’s new spouse automatically becomes a beneficiary of the Will and Trust by operation of law. Many times people…
Non-profits, charities, 501(c)(3)’s, foundations, private foundations, family foundations—what do all these terms have in common? They are typically used to refer to the same thing, an entity that is recognized as not-for-profit under Internal Revenue Code Section 501(c)(3). But not all charities are created equal. There are different types of charities based on the type…
If your goal is to help keep lawyers employed (and that’s an excellent thing to do in my opinion), then do not change your beneficiary forms on your retirement accounts when you do your estate planning.
By retirement accounts, I mean things like 401(k), 403(b), Pension, and IRA type accounts to name a few. These…
I’ve blogged before about using the concept of undue influence to overturn a California Will or Trust. But knowing the definition of undue influence is only the first step. To make the concept of undue influence useful, you have to know how to prove the existence of undue influence in a Court of law. That…
Back in March we offered to provide simple Wills to members of our community at no cost (you know, for free). We decided to limit the program to 20 people per month to ensure that we were not overwhelmed by requests for free simple Wills. And the response to our free Will program was overwhelming. …
Trust and Will lawsuits often provide different paths to the same destination. My client, a trust beneficiary, recently filed a lawsuit against a trustee of a California trust for financial elder abuse, and at the same time sued for undue influence to set aside the Trust amendment created at the hands of the Trustee/Abuser. In…
It is shocking to me how many Trustees violate their fiduciary duties. Under California Probate Code Section 16000 et seq. there are voluminous sections on all the duties, responsibilities, and liabilities Trustees must comply with to property administrate a Trust. There are rules on just about every action a Trustee must take, and on actions the…
One of my first litigation cases was against attorney Thomas W. Dominick in San Bernardino County Probate Court. Tom is one of the best estate and trust litigators in California. To say the least, I was scared. The issue in that case revolved around whether my client had a right to his girlfriend’s real property after…
