Estate Planning, Probate & Elder Law Attorneys

»  Budget So You Never Go Broke
Your job pays peanuts and living costs are through the roof, but a good budget can help you get a handle.

» Jerry Orbach Potential Probate Fight

In the probate litigation system, there are two separate yet equally important parties: the second wife (who usually inherits the decedent's property), and the children of a prior marriage (who sue her). This is their story. [Clank! Clank!]

I should really apologize for that intro, but felt compelled to do it because my wife is a HUGE Jerry Orbach fan. He's up there with Richard Farnsworth (my wife either doesn't get crushes on young, good-looking actors, or she doesn't tell me about those crushes).

Anywho, Jerry Orbach's son is stirring things up via a letter he wrote to his step-mom, which "somehow" became public. The story is here. I don't think the son comes off looking too great here. From a PR perspective, it's hard to make the surviving spouse look evil because she assisted in organ donation. However, the horror movie fan in me does like the grisly imagery of a dead person having their eyes "shucked out" (I thought the verb "shucked" could only be used for oysters, but maybe it applies to the removal of any slimy thing from where it resides?).

» John McCain and Tax Confusion

Recently (here) I had a post about the respective tax policies of Senators Obama and McCain. Slate has more on Senator McCain and taxes, here, although as the writer (Timothy Noah) makes clear, it's not easy to tell exactly what the Senator really thinks.

The Wall Street Journal's Daniel Henninger goes even further on the subject of Senator McCain and taxes, here, in an article entitled "Is John McCain Stupid?" An excerpt:

Is John McCain losing it?

On Sunday, he said on national television that to solve Social Security "everything's on the table," which of course means raising payroll taxes. On July 7 in Denver he said: "Senator Obama will raise your taxes. I won't."

This isn't a flip-flop. It's a sex-change operation.

Mr. Henninger continues:

What I'm asking is, does John McCain have the mental focus, the intellectual discipline, to avoid being out-slicked by Barack Obama, if he isn't abandoned by his own voters?

» Cox: ?Nobody getting a pass? on ARS mess

» Premarital Agreements and Other Areas of Law

Premarital agreements are hard to draft because they can deal with various areas of law. Estate planning and family law are the two biggies, but many different areas of property law can be affected. For instance, I recently was working on a premarital agreement, and the other attorney suggested that, if my client made contribution to his own retirement plan during his marriage, he had to make an equal contribution to his wife's retirement plan. Luckily I realized that the contribution limits for my client's retirement plan (a 401k) and his wife's plan (IRA) were not the same, so we were able to change the language in time. This is one of the reasons why I like working with a non-estate planner on a prenup, and if possible working collaboratively -- we can review the agreement from many different perspectives to make sure it "works."