There are assets that I call legacy assets that need a special level of protection that is not difficult to provide. What do I mean by legacy assets? I mean assets that are intended not to be sold and passed through from one generation to the next. Here are some common examples. A family farm [...]
What do you do when your loved one needs long-term care in a facility but can't afford to pay for it? Medicaid is the answer for 70% of this country's seniors. Medicaid is a means tested, federally-funded program for long-term care that is administered by the Texas Health and Human Services Commission. The most [...]
The most common will is one involving a married couple that says all to the surviving spouse and then equally to our children. Those wills have severe flaws. The first is that the surviving spouse, upon receiving the assets, has the full right to re-gift them how they wish. You might not imagine that your [...]
What is the difference of doing your planning with a will or a living trust? A will is generally a simpler document to draft and therefore you save some up-front costs in creating the document. However, since probate is required of a will, you have costs that are going to be incurred when [...]
What's the difference between doing planning with a will versus a revocable trust? Most people understand the concept of a will. It is someone's written legal instructions as to how their assets are being divided and who is going to be in charge - their executor. A revocable living trust is something that many [...]
A second fundamental reason why we plan is to deal with incapacity or disability as opposed to death. Although I can guarantee you all of you will die, I can assure you that most of you will have someone in your family affected by incapacity. Incapacity means the legal inability to make decisions for yourself [...]
Many think the purpose of drafting a will is to avoid probate. When most people hear the word probate, they think "dispute". Probate doesn't mean disputed; it means the legal process of having the court recognize a person's will as their "last will" and that it's legally valid. And then, also appointing the person named in the will [...]
For most people, when they think of estate planning, they think of planning for death, which is part but not everything. An entirely different subcategory is planning for Medicaid eligibility or avoiding excessive nursing home expenses and we will address that in a future video. But for now, let's concentrate on why we plan and [...]
Just what do we mean when we say you need to do your estate planning? To some that means making sure that they have decreased taxes, decreased legal expenses, or attempted to avoid conflict. Those are all part of the process and things to consider, so estate planning means different things to different [...]
Pyke & Associates is a firm of elder law attorneys. But what does that mean? Unfortunately, the term elder law means different things to different people, so let me explain what we mean by that term at Pyke & Associates. Boiling this down to its simplest, Pyke & Associates does planning to transition [...]