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
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
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
The Problem Isn’t the Will. It’s Everything Else. When Priya’s mother passed away in February, she had a will. Signed, witnessed, stored with a lawyer. By every standard measure, her mother had done the right thing. But when Priya showed up at the family home the following week to begin Read more
He Told Me Three Things. Every One of Them Was Wrong. Marcel isn’t an unreasonable man. He has a will. He’s thought about what happens when he dies, at least enough to put something on paper. He loves his five kids. He’s been married a long time, even if the Read more
What MAID Means for Your Estate Plan Margaret had been thinking about it for two years. After her ALS diagnosis, she’d done her research, spoken with her doctor, and made her decision. She knew the date. Her family knew the date. What nobody had gotten around to was her will. Read more
Estate Planning in Your 30s: What Nobody Told You A few weeks ago, someone in their early 30s told me she’d been meaning to sort out a will for a couple of years. She and her partner had just bought their first place. They had a dog. No kids yet. Read more
Cognitive Decline Can Sneak Up on Us Every family has their own version of this story. A parent starts showing signs, forgetting recent conversations, getting confused about finances, making decisions that seem out of character. The kids look at each other and decide they’ll figure out the planning stuff soon. Read more
Where Estate Plans Usually Fall Short There’s a gap in most people’s estate plans, and the frustrating part is that it’s completely avoidable. The even more frustrating part is that when that gap shows up, it’s rarely the person with the incomplete plan who pays the price. It’s the people Read more
When Everything Has to Go What happens when you have to say goodbye to everything you own?“The hardest part of moving abroad wasn’t the paperwork, the flights, or even leaving people behind. It was standing in the living room, looking at years of accumulated life, and deciding what it was Read more
