The Plain English Attorney Blog
Far too many attorneys overcomplicate things, making topics convoluted and difficult to understand to the average person. This blog is committed to explaining legal planning topics in an easy to understand format, in plain English. Enjoy the blogs, and please let us know if there is a topic you would like covered.
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Recently, I've seen a trend of people wanting to protect their assets from a potential divorce as part of their life planning before getting married. While premarital agreements have a place, there are some ways to get around some or all of the terms in an agreement, and people want to be sure....
Apparently, pets are a touchy subject for me. Having long-term pets like our cat Monty (for almost 20 years now) makes me particularly enraged when I read stories of pets being taken away. In this video, I review an article about police seizing a little girl's pet goat to enforce a contract that...
It has been some time since I've covered Medicaid Myths in this blog, and some of these myths can be deadly to qualifying for Medicaid if followed through. Rather than start a list from scratch, I went straight to the source in my own book The Long Term Care Solution. Here is an excerpt from...
Estate Planning distributions aren’t always clean and even. Sometimes the kids and grandkids need money during life, and providing it to them can raise questions. (This can also be true when using a Will, but now the probate court is involved.) But whether something is classified as a gift,...
Sometimes, messages need to be repeated to make sure they stick. Unfortunately, this often happens with ongoing maintenance with a revocable living trust to make sure that assets line up correctly with the overall estate plan, including the revocable living trust. Unfortunately, the "correctly"...
A revocable living trust can be a great estate planning vehicle that keeps your assets out of probate and minimizes settlement costs. However, there are (at least) seven big mistakes that I has seen when it comes to putting together a revocable trust. While other attorneys may have different...
Over the last few months, several people have approached me about planning to protect them from a marriage that could go wrong. After watching videos and the course on In-Law Protection Planning, they asked about how they could guard against the negatives of a...
A testamentary trust is basically language written into a Last Will and Testament that holds and manages estate assets for a beneficiary over a period of time beyond the probate estate being initially settled. Unfortunately, this has a lot of drawbacks depending on state law.
A testamentary trust...
The Law Offices of Jeffrey G. Marsocci, PLLC is pleased to welcome Hazel Ann D. Mejia to the team! After an exhaustive search and several failed attempts to find someone to work physically in the office, we came to the reluctant conclusion that we had to expand our search and be open to...
One of the most crippling situations for families is when a loved one needs long term care, they start to look at prices for nursing homes, and realize that it is just not possible to keep paying over the long haul without losing everything. Medicaid becomes a path to take to finance your...
One of the most important decisions you can make in the estate planning process is choosing a list of trustees who will pick up the financial ball if you become incapacitated and who will manage your final affairs and distribute inheritances if you pass on. In fact, it is the first of what I...
At the beginning of the year, I and my office recommitted ourselves to providing good, accurate estate planning information to both our clients and the general public. As lives get busier and time grows shorter, people who are beginning to look into a subject often begin with small nuggets of...
