Maureen had done everything right, and she had the paperwork to prove it. The grant of probate. A stack of death certificates. A lawyer who’d walked her through the whole process. And on the kitchen table in front of her, a small black device her father once called “where the Bitcoin lives.”
A friend at church told Evelyn to put her daughter’s name on the house title. No court, no probate, no fuss. Eight years later, that decision has a name she’s never heard, and possibly a filing deadline attached to it.
The Reason You Haven’t Signed Your Will Just Expired Somewhere in your house there’s a phone number for a lawyer. Maybe it’s a business card in a kitchen drawer, or a contact in your phone under a name you’d have to think about for a second before you placed it. Read more
Probate Costs $525 Here and $33,000 There Terrence and Yolanda kept a folder in the hall closet. Two wills, two powers of attorney, two personal directives, the life insurance policies, and a list of account numbers in Yolanda’s handwriting. They’d redone the whole set with a Calgary lawyer the year Read more
How Much Estate Planning Risk Can Your Family Absorb? There’s a moment in every new client meeting where the conversation turns to risk. How would you feel if this dropped fifteen percent in a quarter? Twenty-five? What would keep you up at night? I spent years working alongside financial planners, Read more
The Estate Planning Excuse That Doesn’t Hold Up Anymore Levi had been meaning to update his will for three years. Not because anything was wrong with it, but because every time he thought about starting, his mind jumped straight to lawyers, appointments, and a to-do list that felt too big Read more
The $150,000 Surprise Waiting in Your Family’s Cabin There’s a moment that happens at a lot of family lake properties, usually near the end of a long weekend. Someone looks out at the water and says something like, “This place has to stay in the family.” Everyone nods. Nobody says Read more
The Digital Side of Estate Planning When Arjun Mehta’s father died in the fall, the funeral was the least of his problems. His dad’s line of credit payment was due in four days, and the only way into the bank’s site was a two-factor code sent to an email account Read more
You’ve Been Handling Your Parent’s Finances for Years. You May Have No Legal Authority to Do Any of It. Colette had a system. Every second Tuesday, she’d sit at her mother’s kitchen table with the mail sorted into three piles: bills to pay, statements to file, and anything from the Read more
They Keep Saying They’ll Get to It, But Most Never Do. Marcus and Keiko had been together for eleven years. They owned a home, had two kids in elementary school, and both worked full time. They were organized people. They budgeted. They had RESPs. Every so often, usually after hearing Read more
